January 16, 2006
Last week we saw the beginning of the 2006 General Assembly session. I begin the session with bright hopes that everyone in Richmond will be able to work closely together for the good of all Virginians. There are a lot of new faces this year around the Capitol with sixteen new members of the House of Delegates, one new State Senator and a new Governor, Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General. The next few weeks we will all be learning to deal not only with these new legislators and leaders, but also with a new temporary Capitol. The State Capital Building, designed by Thomas Jefferson, is having its first major renovation in one hundred years, which will cause both the House and Senate to meet in a neighboring building.
In preparation for the session, I have met with many individuals and groups who are interested in how state government can help them or their organization. Virginia is very lucky in that there a good number of citizen organizations which serve noble purposes and help us state legislators better do our job. As I drove around the district I contemplated these requests, and I must say I had plenty of time to think about the best way to deal with each request. (The Fifteenth Senate District that I have the honor of representing is two and a half times larger than the state of Rhode Island — which means a great deal of thinking time in the car for me!) One of the things that came to mind was something I covered in one of the very first political speeches I made when I first ran for the General Assembly back in 1991.
I was campaigning in the Tidewater area, when I gave a speech pointing out that Eastern Europe dumped Communism as a system of government — not because they were tired of the form of government they had but rather because it could not deliver.
They had been taught for decades to forget family, forget church, and instead rely on government. When too many people became too reliant on government, there simply were not enough resources to provide all that the people had come to expect.
When the gridlock of too much demand for government clashed with limited resources those governments simply collapsed.
I raised this issue then and I raise it again now because I have seen in my lifetime a steady increase in the expectations of government. As I mentioned at the beginning of this column, much is expected of government and most of those expectations are reasonable. However the question we must ask of government at every level — federal, state, and local — is a simple one. "Can we afford to provide this service or should this more properly be a responsibility of the individual, the family, or the infrastructure of our individual communities?"
As I go through this session, I will do the best I can to properly answer that question on an array of issues that will be before the General Assembly.
As always, I welcome your input and hope you will feel free to contact my office whenever there are issues of concern to you or you need my assistance in dealing with state government. You can reach me by email, by telephone at 804-698-7515 or by mail at P.O. Box 396, Richmond, VA 23218.