With the General Assembly starting next week, the pace is quickening.  Legislative staff is writing, bill drafts are being reviewed, lawyers are telling us laymen why laws “won’t work” and, of course, already several hundred bills are already pre-filed.
So far, the General Assembly has filed a bill to address everything from falconry to synthetic marijuana.  Below is a short list of some of the pre-filed bills:
HB1404  (Howell, A-D) will prohibit the use of cell phones while driving, riding a bike, operating a wheelchair, Segway or moped.  The bill also requires that it be a primary offense.  In other words, if you are seen driving and talking on a cell phone, you can be stopped and ticketed.
HB1426 (Oder-R) will make it easier for people to identify taxicabs.
HB1434 (Garrett-R) is one of several bills that are being advanced to make it illegal to sell, distribute or possess synthetic marijuana, aka “spice”, while HB 1443 (Morgan-R) makes possession of real marijuana a civil offense instead of a criminal offense.
HB 1442 (Morgan-R) has introduced legislation to update the laws on falconry. Currently, an individual is permitted to have no more than three raptors but the bill would remove that restriction.  It also would allow an individual to retrieve their bird from another person’s property by foot.  And, it makes it illegal for anyone to remove the tracking device on the birds without the express permission of the owner.
HB1518 (Orrock-R) requires schools to add economics and financial literacy to their curriculum.  
This is just a sampling of the legislation that has been filed to date.  A full list of the bills already submitted can be found at leg1.state.va.us, or by visiting my website at www.albertpollard.com.  The deadline to submit the bills for consideration in the 2011 General Assembly session is 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday, January 12, 2011.  Session officially begins at noon on January 12, 2011.

The U.S. Constitution requires that every 10 years legislative districts have their lines readjusted so that their populations can be approximately equal.  This is the process known as redistricting.  It is an attempt to honor the concept that we are all created equal. 

If legislative districts were not created equal, then those districts with fewer people would have disproportionately more impact on the legislative process.  However, the U.S. Constitution does not give guidance as to how those legislative lines should be drawn.  And the Virginia Constitution provides ambiguous direction stating the districts must be “contiguous and compact”.

All of this is to say that the four counties of the Northern Neck are not legally required to be in the same Congressional, State Senate or House of Delegates district -- despite the fact that it makes common sense to do so (in fact, in 1991 Democrats drew Richmond County out of the state senate district that contained the remaining three Northern Neck counties).