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.
Chris Graham: Smaller government, with a catch
I don’t personally have any issue with the notion that government needs to be run more efficiently and run more like a business. Anybody with experience managing a business or organization knows that there are inevitably inefficiencies that can be accounted for and corrected to make things run more smoothly.
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.
More columns from Chris Graham at TheWorldAccordingToChrisGraham.com.
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:
- Encourage prayer at public events and meetings
- Make English the state’s official language
- Create a special “In God we trust” license plate
- Grant unpaid leave to state representatives
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.
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.
Emmett Hanger: Tackling the budget responsibly
Posted by afp on April 11, 2012 · Leave a Comment
Filed under Blogs · Tagged with emmett hanger, virginia state budget