The 2011 General Assembly session has entered the home stretch. With just one full week remaining before the scheduled adjournment on February 26, legislative workdays are getting longer as lawmakers work to finish the process of hearing the hundreds of bills still under consideration this session.
This year, the final legislative week begins with a holiday. As I have noted before however, holidays during a General Assembly session are marked by speeches and not days off.
February 21 is Washington’s Birthday. While this federal holiday has been marketed by retailers as “President’s Day” for as long as anyone can remember, the official name for the day still honors only one of the 43 men who have served in that high office.
As we head into the 2011 legislative session, I wanted to give everyone a brief overview of the legislation that I will be introducing. Since this is a short session, I tried very hard not to carry as many bills as I do in a long session. But as often is the case, duty calls and we have to take these bills. I started out with about 35 and I have been able to narrow that down to about 25, which, in all honesty, is probably too many to try to work during a short session, but all of them have merit of their own.
One of the most important bills that I will be carrying is a very important economic development bill, both for my district and the state of Virginia. The bill essentially would give a tax credit to corporations that would move into Virginia from other states and reduce the corporate tax in half for them in an amount equal to their capital investment in their offices or location in the state, assuming they do certain things. Likewise, it would allow corporations in Virginia that are in areas of population over 200,000 to locate satellite operations in areas with population of under 200,000 to receive the same tax credit, as long as they either hire new people or reduce the commute mileage of their current employees substantially. This bill encourages new business to locate in my district from Fauquier and Stafford all the way down to Lancaster. Obviously, our populations are below that threshold. What it also does is it would take commuters off the road so that their quality of life is so much better if they don’t have to drive an hour or two every day to go to their jobs in Northern Virginia and would ease congestion on the road.
As this legislative session came to a close, obviously the last few weeks were dealt with adopting a state balanced biennial budget for 2011 and 2012. Unfortunately, it was a budget that I could not support.
Along with the budget, we viewed almost 3,000 pieces of legislation. As for myself, I had 15 fairly substantive bills that passed the General Assembly this year from legislation to help special needs children, to public safety measures, to bills to help veterans get property tax relief and ensuring the stability of our menhaden fishery.
The most notable of all my bills was the bill to increase the fee for civil litigation. Many of you have heard much about this and it was a sticking point in the budget negotiations. The bill increases the filing fee for people who want to sue each other for personal injury or other civil litigation, but it also raised the money necessary to fund the sheriffs’ offices and the commonwealth attorneys.
This has been the busiest session of the Senate that I have observed since being elected to serve you in the Virginia Senate. That is largely due to the fact that we are in a budgetary crisis. The budget process looms over everything that we are doing and people are trying to come up with ways to fill the gaps or make the cuts that will be necessary to balance our budget this year.
Aside from that, I have had 12 substantive bills pass the Senate and are now headed for consideration by the House of Delegates. These bills encompass many public safety issues, natural resource issues and property matters.
One of the most difficult bills that I have worked on was the menhaden fisheries cap. That cap to protect the fishery was negotiated a few years ago and is designed to ensure we have a healthy and sustainable population of menhaden for both sport fishermen and the menhaden industry, which
As promised, this report deals
exclusively with the results of the special session on Wednesday, August, 19,
2009, to deal with the United States Supreme Court in Melendez-Diaz vs. Massachusetts.
The bill that was presented to
the legislature had two major components.
The first is that the bill now conforms Virginia’s law Notice and Demand
statute more closely to the laws which were specifically approved in Melendez-Diaz vs. Massachusetts.
Under the bill, a Commonwealth’s
Attorney will now send a copy of a certificate of analysis to the defense
counsel or defendant at least 28 days prior to trial. This notice will apprise the defendant that he has 14 days
to object to the introduction of the certificate and effectively demand that
the Commonwealth produce at trial the person who conducted the analysis. If the defendant does not object, his
or her right to confront this witness at trial is waived and the certificate is
admissible so long as it meets all other statutory requirements.
The second major component is the
addition of a tolling provision to Virginia’s speedy trial requirement. Compared to other states’ laws and to
the Constitutional requirement of speedy trial, Virginia law requires that the
accused be tried in a very short time frame – 5 months for an incarcerated
person and 9 months for a person out on bond.
