Ticket deadline for Art Center Gala approaching
The Staunton Augusta Art Center announces its Golden Gala and biennial art auction set for May 21, 2011, at 6 p.m. at the Stonewall Jackson Hotel and Conference Center. Tickets are available to the general public for the dinner, auction and program which will celebrate the Staunton Augusta Art Center’s 50th year of operation.
The price of admission is $75 and reservations are required by calling the Staunton Augusta Art Center at 540-885-2028 no later than Monday, May 16. All proceeds will support the Staunton Augusta Art Center’s activities and programs.
The auction phase of the evening is a biennial event which serves as an important fundraiser for the non-profit organization whose mission is to make the enjoyment and creation of visual art available to everyone and to support artists by providing them venues to teach and to exhibit and sell their work.
The Staunton Augusta Art Center has a long history of hosting gallery exhibitions to the public at no charge, orchestrating the annual Art in the Park (also at no admission charge), offering a unique holiday shopping opportunity through Art for Gifts every November and December, teaching a variety of art classes to adults and to children including the annual Summer Studio, and advocating for arts and tourism.
Sen. Mark Warner is serving as honorary co-chair of the Golden Gala and Sen. Emmett Hanger will be in attendance to present a very special Joint Resolution by the General Assembly in commemoration of the Art Center’s 50th year and service to the community. A long tradition of the Staunton Augusta Art Center, the biennial silent and live auctions showcase excellence in the visual arts, culinary arts, literary arts, home décor, jewelry, and entertainment.
Valley conservation leaders encouraged, cautioned
Funding challenges, the far-reaching impact of the Chesapeake Bay Act, and the rapidly rising importance of urban conservation took center stage at the Spring Meeting of the six Soil and Water Conservation Districts serving the 13 counties of the Shenandoah Valley and adjacent highlands.
Addressing the 60+ attendees, State Sen. Emmett Hanger, R-Mount Solon, noted the shift in Virginia’s rural-urban populations and the resulting impact on urban conservation, to include storm water runoff and its costly effects – that is, the huge sums spent on water treatment to remove pollutants. The senator called for significant increases in the everyday use of non-potable water (e.g., toilets and yard watering), which he claimed would save hundreds of millions of dollars once widely implemented. Hanger also reminded districts that the historical reliance on data from government-subsidized conservation practices provided imperfect estimates on watershed pollutant levels. He encouraged districts to find ways to capture the untracked impact of voluntary conservation practices to more precisely identify and monitor contaminants.
Like his Senate colleague, State Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Bath, stressed the importance of conservation, but warned Districts that Richmond is notoriously frugal, a fact borne out in Virginia’s last-place ranking in per capita spending on conservation. Deeds cautioned districts that Virginia will suffer greatly from federal budget cuts, as Washington has provided most of the funding for the Commonwealth’s conservation program.
Ed Overton, president of the Virginia Association of Soil & Water Conservation Districts, said the Association was “grateful to the Senate and House for recognizing the significance of the districts’ work in addressing statewide water quality issues.” He thanked the senators and their colleagues for appropriating one million dollars of the $2.8 million requested to implement Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay Watershed Implementation Plan, approved by the Environmental Protection Agency in late November.
David Kriz of USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service cautioned that forthcoming Federal budget cuts will soon force NRCS to push more conservation issues to partner agencies – including Virginia’s 47 Conservation Districts. Meanwhile, Jim Echols, regional manager for the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation, warned conservation staff and leaders about the difficult challenge districts face in educating Virginians unaware of the scope, depth, and size of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The Chesapeake Bay WIP identifies numerous actions needed to reduce major sources of nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment flowing into the Bay. Key sources targeted under the plan include sewage treatment plants, industrial facilities, urban areas, septic systems, and the agricultural and forestry sectors.
The VASWCD is addressing the skyrocketing importance of urban conservation with the creation of a dual-track program to aid the 30 percent of Virginians living in urban areas. The first component of this initiative is securing a grant to establish a pilot urban “cost-share” program. The second facet, modeled after successful efforts in Illinois and North Carolina, is the establishment of a diverse program of urban-focused options from streambed restoration and rain gardens to education and training in Low-Impact Development.
Individuals interested in learning more about the key roles conservation plays in the lives of all Virginians should contact their local Soil and Water Conservation District or the Virginia Association of Soil and Water Conservation Districts at 804.559.0324. Additional information is available online at www.vaswcd.org.
Campaign finance: GOP incumbents report cash totals
A look at campaign-finance numbers for the upcoming 2011 Virginia General Assembly elections shows long-time Republican State Sen. Emmett Hanger in the best money position among local incumbents.
Hanger reported $98,448 in cash on hand as of March 31, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. Hanger, R-Mount Solon, has a proven ability to raise money. The Mount Solon resident spent $286,217 on his 2007 re-election in the 24th Senate District, most of it – $259,619 – in a tightly contested May GOP primary, in which he defeated challenger Scott Sayre by less than 600 votes.
Rockbridge Republican State Del. Ben Cline reported $29,173 cash on hand as of March 31. The 24th House District representative spent $148,109 on his 2009 re-election campaign, in which he defeated Democrat Jeff Price, receiving 71.2 percent of the vote.
Weyers Cave Republican Steve Landes reported $5,706 cash on hand on March 31. Landes spent $140,472 on his 2009 re-election campaign in the 25th House District, in which he defeated Democrat Greg Marrow, receiving 73.2 percent of the vote.
Staunton Republican Dickie Bell reported $5,204 cash on hand on March 31. Bell spent $55,020 on his 2009 election in the 20th House District, in which he defeated Democrat Erik Curren, receiving 71.2 percent of the vote.
The Valley’s maverick Republican: Hanger gears up for State Senate re-election run
It hasn’t been that long since the word “maverick” triggered the next drink in the drinking game. John McCain, the original GOP maverick, has since made a hard turn to the far right, judging his political survival to be of more import than his political legacy.
The maverick is a dying breed in the Republican Party. Emmett Hanger is personally aware of the endangerment of the species.
“My answer to the critics is that I’m a Teddy Roosevelt Republican. We’re being taken advantage of not just by big government, but big corporations are a problem as well. With a lot of strong emphasis on the environment. I’m a big proponent of state and national parks and open space. That’s where I find myself right now. I look back to a lot of things that Roosevelt had back in that era as being important being relevant in today’s climate,” said Hanger, a Republican dating back to not all the way to TR, but still to when being a Republican wasn’t exactly cool in Virginia, when he jokes that you could “hold party meetings in a phone booth,” and whose reputation took something of a hit in 2007 with a State Senate primary challenge that nearly ended his political career.
Hanger survived the scare, went on to an easy general-election victory that November, and is on track to making a run at a fifth term in the State Senate in 2011. But the battle scars from ’07 are still visible in talking with him. “Ironically, given some of the political scuttlebutt that I’ve been branded with, my political outlook is very, very conservative,” said Hanger, 62, who was first elected to political office in 1979, half his life ago, literally.
The fuel to the fire that drove the 2007 primary challenge from a Rockbridge County businessman, Scott Sayre, that was backed by several local GOP leaders, was Hanger’s role in the bipartisan tax-reform effort that included a series of tax hikes and tax cuts adopted in 2004 that effectively added a billion dollars to the state government’s bottom line. The firebrands labeled it a billion-dollar tax increase and vowed to purge from the Republican ranks those within the party who had played a role in making it happen.
Hanger, defending his work on tax reform for taking the tax burden off localities and low-income families, narrowly won that primary, beating Sayre by 866 votes, largely on the strength of his much-higher-than-expected voter turnout in Augusta County and Staunton, his home bases, which he won by a combined 1,879 votes. He rolled to a landslide victory over Democrat David Cox in November, but the intra-Republican Party squabbling continued well into 2008, when a struggle for control of the Republican committee in Augusta County ended with the resignation of Kurt Michael, who had played a key role in the dump-Hanger putsch as the chair of the county GOP.
Hanger, who did not attend the party mass meeting that saw the re-election of Michael’s successor in Augusta County, Bill Shirley, earlier this year, is in the rare breed of politicians – with the likes of Mark Warner and John Warner and a few others – who almost don’t need a party machinery because of their wide base of support on both sides of the aisle. Hanger echoes the Warners in the critique from moderates on both sides of the political divide as to what ails American politics in the current day and age.
“When I was first getting politically active, there was just more of a pervasive general spirit of camaraderie. What we see today is a general lack of civility in politics,” Hanger said. “I think we’ve gotten way too partisan in our governance. There’s always a place for partisanship, but in governance, I just think we’re way too engaged in the partisanship. The partisanship that you see taking over governance in Washington has drifted to Richmond. It’s very obvious when our caucuses meet that a lot of our focus is on, How are we going to get ourselves re-elected? How are we going to gain more power in Richmond?”
Whether Sayre or another challenger will emerge to give Hanger a run for the Republican nomination and then in the general election in 2011 is still up in the air at this point. The stronger challenge would seem to be the intraparty one, if it were to come – particularly with the ascendance of the Tea Party, which didn’t even exist four years, on the political scene.
“There’s been a longstanding and continuing brawl within the Republican Party in Virginia over how moderate and how conservative to be. At times you see the moderate wing winning, and at various times you see the conservative wing winning. Perhaps you’ll see the Tea Party give reinforcements to the conservative wing of the Republican Party of Virginia, which has been in ascendancy in the past few years,” said Isaac Wood, a political analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
“The Senate is where what moderates there are in Virginia still exist. To the extent to which the Tea Party crowd in Virginia has been energized, it makes sense that if they’re going to go after any moderates who don’t toe the line, as far as they’re concerned, then they’re going to go after Republicans in the Senate,” said Quentin Kidd, the chair of the political-science department at Christopher Newport University.
All signs seem to point to Hanger being there to fight the battle, but it’s hard not to hear a tinge of second thoughts entering into his thinking as he moves forward toward a decision.
“You talk about, will I run again? If I get to the point where I’m spending more time calculating strategies for re-electing myself rather than actually governance and enacting good policy, then I’m going to quit,” Hanger said.
“I’ve been involved, I’ve done it, and I really believe I could walk away from it. I won’t right now, because I believe my experience and the relationships that I’ve built are valuable to this area and to statewide policy. So I want to remain engaged even more than I have in the past. But I don’t like the partisan governance. I hope we can move beyond that and focus on good policy,” Hanger said.
Story by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
Legislative breakfast
The Greater Augusta Regional Chamber of Commerce invites you and your guests to attend the Legislative Breakfast on Wednesday, Dec. 15, from 8-9 a.m. at Bentley Commons of Staunton.
Our area legislators, State Sen. Emmett Hanger and State Dels. Steve Landes, Ben Cline and Dickie Bell, will be briefing members on hot issues and bills coming before the 2011 General Assembly session in Richmond.
The floor will then be opened up for a question and answer period following their remarks.
Enjoy a delicious breakfast at a cost of $15 per person.
RSVP to chamber@ntelos.net or call 540.324.1133.
Hanger: ‘I don’t consider the current ABC operation a problem’
Gov. Bob McDonnell’s plan to use money from the privatization of state-run ABC stores to fund transportation-infrastructure improvements is likely to die a quiet death in the 2011 Virginia General Assembly, according to State Sen. Emmett Hanger.
“I think some of us have decided that we would sit on it a little bit, let him make his case, in all fairness to him. But there comes a point if he persists in trying to develop a strategy to get it passed, and we’re just sitting passively allowing him to do that, the debate needs to happen,” said Hanger, R-Mount Solon, who added in an interview for a feature story in the December issue of The New Dominion Magazine that he is “hopeful that we won’t spend a lot of time and energy on this in the session.”
“I think this governor has a lot of political capital right now, and I’d like to see him use that political capital to solve real problems. And I don’t consider the current ABC operation a problem,” said Hanger, who is wrapping up his fourth term in the State Senate.
Hanger is a member and former chair of the Senate Rehabilitation and Social Services Committee, which has oversight over ABC operations, and is currently the chair of the Commonwealth Competition Council, an independent advisory body that examines opportunities for privatization of services right now provided by the state.
Both bodies have looked at ABC privatization in depth. A stumbling block in the reviews: “ABC is very well run and is contributing a significant amount of money to the general fund,” Hanger said.
Buttressing that perspective: “There’s a reason we have ABC control. From a substance-abuse standpoint, there’s a valid reason for the state to be involved,” Hanger said.
Based on the reviews, “Diverting that money by saying that you’re going to sell it and then giving that money to transportation is something of a nonstarter for me,” Hanger said.
Hanger is joining with a bipartisan group of state senators calling for an increase in the state gas tax as the most sensible approach to providing new revenues for transportation improvements.
“I don’t consider myself moderate to any degree on tax policy. What I do strongly adhere to, and I think this is very conservative – you pay for things,” Hanger said. “And we have a real need now to pay for our transportation infrastructure. And a gas tax is a user fee, in my opinion. Tolls are a user fee. In my opinion, we should adjust our gas tax and our user fees, tolls, to pay for the infrastructure that we need rather than creating things to avoid it.”
Virginia has not made any adjustments to its gas tax since setting the current 17.5-cent rate in 1986. In the intervening nearly quarter-century, increased fuel efficiency in vehicles has effectively reduced the spending power of the dollars that the tax can raise.
“Instead of getting 10 miles to the gallon, people get 30 miles to the gallon, still traveling the same amount of lane miles. It makes rational sense that you’d have to increase the fuel tax in order to compensate on a cents-per-gallon basis,” Hanger said. “If we had leadership that was basically saying that, rather than, We’ve got plenty of money, we’re just misallocating it, then people would understand that. There would be a political consensus that you could take care of that problem. We haven’t been there.”
Where we have been instead is having former governor Tim Kaine pushing the notion that the state needs to put its transportation dollars into a lockbox, which Hanger termed “soundbite politics,” and McDonnell playing politics with the finding in an audit report that the Virginia Department of Transportation is sitting on more than a billion in unspent road funds.
“The spin that’s been put out on that, I can’t allow that to stand. We’d all be stupid if we had a billion dollars laying around and didn’t realize it,” said Hanger, adding that the actual amount of unspent monies is closer to half a billion dollars, and was left there because the state used money from the federal stimulus to go toward shovel-ready transportation projects. “It wasn’t lost money. It was accumulated there in tight times from a conservative posture of not spending your last dollar,” Hanger said.
Story by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
81: Wait and see
Special Report by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
You might remember all the hubbub over what they were planning to do with Interstate 81. They were going to pave over the Valley! That was what people were saying, anyway, looking at the monstrosities of plans that we knew as the Star Solutions proposal and the Fluor proposal, not to mention what the Virginia Department of Transportation itself seemed to have in the works.
People came out in record numbers to public hearings up and down the Valley and Southwest Virginia to let officialdom know what they thought of the plans. The basic message: Thanks, but no thanks.
But there was also some ambivalence to our stand. After all, not many of us like having to deal with the truck congestion on 81, which is carrying twice the capacity of trucks that it was designed for – and considering the design flaws that any non-engineer can see with the long hills and windy curves that we’re somehow supposed to navigate to get to Roanoke or Harrisonburg or Winchester or Bristol, well, that’s saying something.
Those of us who had the time to give the issue some thought wanted to see the state look more at rail, which is to say, we wanted them to actually look at rail, as opposed to making it look like they were when we knew from reading their reports that they really weren’t. They eventually did, and released a report a few weeks ago on how increased rail capacity in Western Virginia could impact congestion on I-81.
Kudos also go out to the technocrats and their friends in the policy realm for getting to work on a new rail line connecting Manassas to Front Royal that will take some of the pressure off 81.
So we sort of got what we wanted on rail, and also sort of got what we wanted on the paving-over-of-the-Valley, because we’re now in the second decade of the 21st century, and the Valley hasn’t yet been paved over, and looking at the state’s finances, and multiple transportation-funding priorities, it’s not going to happen anytime soon, and anytime soon could be, 20 years, 30 years?
Which isn’t to say that there aren’t still issues with congestion that will need to be dealt with.
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Tax and spend
Streamlining effort could raise revenues, but at the cost of jobs
Special Report by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
The state of Virginia is losing as much as $400 million a year to uncollected taxes from Internet retailers. Streamlining a process for collecting them isn’t as easy as some would like to make it out to be – and could cost jobs in the meantime.
“We don’t dodge taxes. We pay our taxes. We pay on time. And if we make a mistake of some sort, we pay our penalties. That’s not the issue. This is supposed to be simple, but it’s everything but simple,” said Stacey Strawn, the co-owner of Blue Moon Galleries, a Waynesboro-based Internet retailer that grew from a desk in a converted bedroom office.
Now employing six, Blue Moon is by every definition a Main Street mom-and-pop – taking up residence in an abandoned building on Main Street in struggling Downtown Waynesboro, with co-owners in the husband-and-wife team of Strawn and Steve Dahl.
It’s the Main Street mom-and-pops who are ostensibly the focus for advocates of a streamlined sales tax. An effort has been under way dating back to the early part of the 2000s decade aimed at corraling the tax revenues lost to the intricacies of the U.S. tax system, which leaves the collection of sales taxes to the individual states and localities. Continue reading “Tax and spend” »
What happened to tax reform?
Special Report by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
The push toward tax reform that caught up in its inner workings the sitting governor and a future governor among its bipartisan leaders fell surprisingly silent after 2004, much like the tree in the woods with no one there to witness if it actually makes a sound. Continue reading “What happened to tax reform?” »
Tate gets endorsements from Hanger, Allen
Edited by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
Today Staunton City Council Candidate Carl Tate received the endorsement of State Sen. Emmett W. Hanger and former governor and U.S. senator George F. Allen. Continue reading “Tate gets endorsements from Hanger, Allen” »
Four perspectives on Confederate History Month
Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
Gov. Bob McDonnell has declared April to be Confederate History Month, but if you’ve read a newspaper or turned on the TV news anytime in the past few days, you knew that already.
You also know that plenty of people are plenty mad that he did this, that plenty of people are plenty pleased that he did it, and that not surprisingly the ensuing back-and-forth resulted in a media firestorm that pushed McDonnell into backtracking mode and even caught President Barack Obama in some crossfire on the fringe of the controversy.
We wanted to go beyond the press releases and the yelling matches on TV and virtual yelling matches online to the heart of whatever the matter is here. To do so, we engaged four people – Brag Bowling, the commander of the Virginia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans; Chanda McGuffin, the president of the Staunton branch of the NAACP; Emmett Hanger, a Republican Virginia state senator; and Mark Rozell, a George Mason University political-science professor whose scholarship focuses on Republican Party politics.
If sense can be made of the Confederate History Month proclamation and the fracas that followed, it will come from talking with people with this diversity of viewpoints to bring to bear to the discussion. Continue reading “Four perspectives on Confederate History Month” »
Chris Graham: Smaller government, with a catch
Posted by afp on December 3, 2010 · 6 Comments
A problem I have is with politicians who claim to be small-government types on the one hand then on the other hand going out and pushing big government in the form of social engineering.
Case in point: State Del. Dickie Bell and his supposed zeal for small government. Bell told a town-hall audience this week that he’d like to see state agencies adopt a zero-based budgeting method touted by some conservatives as the panacea to growth in government spending.
Aside: Which would be great, except that the great bulk of growth in government spending comes in the area of entitlements – Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, veterans benefits. Very, very few elected officials are willing to even consider even restraining the growth in entitlements because doing so would be at the least political masochism and at worst suicide.
But I digress. So Bell has this zeal for small government, as evidenced by his zeal for zero-based budgeting. And then he tells the town-hall folks, according to The News Virginian, that he plans to introduce legislation in the 2011 Virginia General Assembly to:
That last one has a personal touch for Bell, who lost a battle with the Augusta County School Board for paid leave from his teaching job related to his legislative work.
What in the name of small government is there to any of the above from Bell? It looks to me that what Bell is doing here is creating more work for Steve Landes, who you might remember made it one of his key areas of focus as a state legislator to set up a process for finding outdated and frivolous state laws to have taken off the books.
I know quite a few local Democrats who poke fun at Landes for those efforts, basically saying that Landes could find a lot more worthwhile pursuits to take up his time representing the people in Richmond, but I’ve actually been behind Landes on that from the get-go. From my own experience in business and specifically what we do in business, I think the more streamlined you can be in terms of the rules you have to play by, what you’re trying to present to potential clients or customers, et cetera, the better off you’re going to be.
I support Bob Goodlatte and Emmett Hanger in their efforts to streamline the federal tax code and the way state and local governments assess and collect taxes. Even if the result would be a dollar-for-dollar return on monies collected in the new system, as I’d suspect there would be, think of the savings for individuals, families and small, medium and big business in terms of compliance.
I guess what I’m saying here is, Small government isn’t starving government. Some partisans have made a living out of demonizing government even as we’d all have to concede that we wouldn’t have national defense and internal security and roads and public education without the coalescing of interests and means to pay for it and administer it and maintain it, and that’s what government is, ultimately.
Beware, I’d warn, those who preach smaller government out of one side of their mouth and then out of the other offer up myriad ways for government to grow its influence over daily life.
Filed under Blogs · Tagged with bob goodlatte, chris graham, dickie bell, emmett hanger, small government, steve landes