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Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor Candidates
The potential seconds in command detail their strategies for the next four years
By Chase Johnson
September 17, 2009
The office of lieutenant governor doesn’t carry the same prestige as its gubernatorial counterpart, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay attention to the race for the Commonwealth’s second highest office. The winner will work closely with the governor, helping him propose and enact policy that could affect your taxes, your commute, your children’s education and your family’s safety. The lieutenant governor also stands to ascend to the governorship, should the chief executive become unable to fulfill his duties. So come Nov. 3, don’t simply check the box for the party identification next to the candidates’ names. Find out what each candidate has planned for Northern Virginia to decide who gets your vote.
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| Jody Wagner | Bill Bolling |
| Party: Democratic Age: 54 Family: Married, four children Occupation: Lawyer, Small Business Owner Experience: 2006-2008 Secretary of Finance 2002-2006 Treasurer of Virginia 2000 Candidate for U.S. House of Representatives, Virginia’s 2nd District |
Party: Republican Age: 52 Family: Married, two children Occupation: Politician, VP of Insurance Agency Experience: 2006-Present Lieutenant Governor 1996-2005 Senator, Virginia State Senate, 4th District 1991-1995 Member of Hanover County Board of Supervisors |
| ECONOMY | |
| The areas that we have really not enhanced as much as we need to are some of the incentives and some of the creative things that we can do to attract what I would call 21st-century businesses to the Commonwealth; those would be businesses in biotech and green energy. … It is important to continue to remain in the forefront. We have tools in the toolbox that are insufficient: The Governor’s Opportunity Fund, which the House of Delegates has continually voted to cut as we’ve tried to increase it in the Kaine and the Warner Administrations, is woefully short of where it needs to be. … We also, I believe, need a second fund that is geared specifically to attract 21st-century businesses. … We need to be looking at incentives that will compete with Maryland and some of the other states—North Carolina, for example—to attract research-based, exciting opportunities that will really help ignite the Northern Virginia economy. | We want to provide more tax incentives to encourage businesses to locate in Virginia, to make investments and create jobs in Virginia. … We want to streamline regulations to make Virginia a more business-friendly place. We specifically want to do that in the area of small business, which is the backbone of our economy. … We want to double the size of the Governor’s Economic Opportunity Fund, which is the incentive fund that we use to attract new businesses to Virginia. We want to make additional investments, even in these challenging economic times, in important programs like the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, the Virginia Tourism Council, the Virginia Film Office. These are all programs that can help lead us out of the economic recession that we’re in the midst of right now. … And we’re very determined to protect our right to work law, because we know that that is probably the most important economic development arrow that we have in our economic development quiver. … Technology is an area that I’m confident we’re going to continue to focus on and excel in. … We have Northern Virginia, which is a hub of what’s going on in Washington, D.C., so any kind of businesses related to federal government operations are good targets for Virginia. Anything related to the military is a good target for Virginia because of the presence that we have of military installations both in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads. |
| REVENUES | |
| On any new revenue, I think we need to look at the formulas that we use and look at the issues that the Commonwealth is facing and target revenues for solving those problems. If congestion is an issue, which it clearly is in Northern Virginia, we ought to be allocating dollars based on congestion levels. | There are clearly some areas where taxes generated in Northern Virginia help support other regions of the state where they do not have as much of an ability to generate tax revenue on their own. … A disproportionate amount of tax revenues generated in Northern Virginia, for example, will go to other parts of the state to help support public education. But there are other areas of the budget where Northern Virginia receives a great deal of current state expenditures. Transportation would be an example of that because a lot of our major transportation projects today are actually Northern Virginia based transportation projects. … We’ve actually proposed allowing Northern Virginia localities to keep a designated percentage of sales tax revenue that’s generated within Northern Virginia and then use that money to pay for needed highway construction and maintenance projects on a regional basis. |
| TRANSPORTATION | |
| We need to enhance our public transportation. … Dulles rail is a prime example. … That is one step; there are a lot of other steps that need to be taken on the public transportation front. But we do have some infrastructure needs that we also have to address, and all that takes resources. It’s going to be very important that we make sure that we are developing the resources necessary to deal with the transportation needs. I have a few simple rules though. I don’t think that you can rob education, public safety and health care to deal with transportation. … But at the same time, we do need to fund transportation. We need a sustainable revenue stream that will allow us to build the infrastructure and the public transportation that we need. And we need to recognize that the way people fuel their cars is changing. Right now most of the transportation dollars are based on the gas tax. I’m an example of what’s happening all over the Commonwealth. Ten years ago I drove a car that got 20 miles to the gallon. Today, I drive a car that gets 47 miles to the gallon. I’m still driving on the same roads, but I’m paying less to do it. And that’s going to continue to happen as we deal with trying to get off of fossil energies and try and get better fuel efficiencies. I think it’s going to have to be a multifaceted approach. Public-private partnerships are a piece of it, and we see that happening right now with the HOT Lanes development up in Northern Virginia. … We’d like to do as much rail as possible and the more federal funding that we can get the better. The federal government is paying a piece of the Dulles rail project. The state just put in a request trying to receive funding for higher speed rail from the Petersburg area all the way through Richmond and up to Northern Virginia. That would be a huge improvement; it would take a lot of pressure off of 95 and would also help connect different parts of the state. … We need higher-speed rail that goes all the way from Virginia Beach to Blacksburg, and all the way from Petersburg to Northern Virginia, because then we’re connecting all of the different universities in the state and connecting the different population areas. | We’ve proposed what I believe is the most comprehensive, realistic and workable transportation solution that we’ve probably seen in 20 years. And that package, if we can fully implement it, will generate about $1.4 billion a year in additional funding for transportation. … We’ve also made a series of changes that would result, I think, in some efficiency improvements within the way the Department of Transportation works to make sure that we’re spending our transportation dollars wisely, that we’re bringing projects in on time and on budget. … As a part of our transportation package, we have proposed taking the new revenues that we generate from our program and focusing them on certain priority transportation projects throughout the state, and on a statewide basis, one of the things that we want to focus those revenues on is our efforts to move forward with the construction of high-speed passenger rail from Washington to Richmond and to Hampton Roads. |
| ENERGY | |
| First, we as a nation have got to get away from foreign oil. I think we’d all agree to that. I think we also agree, or should all agree, that we need to (to the extent that we can) get off of fossil fuels and use alternative energy. … That’s why one of the main planks of my economic development effort is to try and enhance green energy jobs in the Commonwealth, because I think it’s sort of a double benefit: We reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, and we enhance and rebuild good-paying jobs here in Virginia. And we’ve got great opportunities with wind energy, with solar energy, with biomass energy, and our universities are doing some great research that can be put to commercial use. … We need to really fund those and encourage those activities and encourage businesses that are going to take those industries and move them forward. With regard to offshore drilling, I’m not opposed to researching it and looking into it, but I do want an answer to two very important questions before we commit to it. The first is: What effect will it have on the military establishments in the Hampton Roads area? … Forty-five percent of the jobs in the Hampton Roads area have some connection to the military. … I want to be positive that we would not adversely affect our ability to keep those bases if we put oil rigs off the coast. The second industry, which is very exciting in Virginia, is the new spaceflight activities that are going on at Wallops Island. … It’s pretty unique because being on the East Coast where we’re located and the way the launch patterns operate … there is the cleanest amount of time for the rockets to go over water before they [pass over] populous land if you launch from the Virginia Eastern Shore, as compared to a lot of other locations which are trying to develop space flight in other states. We just need to make sure that if we’re going to do any kind of drilling off the coast, it doesn’t hurt that industry. | I support the expansion of both traditional forms of energy like nuclear and coal and development of offshore oil and natural gas. I also support alternatives like renewable sources of energy like wind and solar and biofuels. The truth is that, to solve our energy problems today and to make Virginia the East Coast energy leader today, we need to do all these things, not just one or two of these things. … We need more nuclear power in Virginia, we need to use more coal in Virginia. … And we need to develop our offshore oil and natural gas. I think that could have a huge economic benefit for Virginia. … We’ve also proposed, by the way, the creation of something called the Virginia Energy Institute, which would try to coordinate … the energy-based academic research that’s being done at our eight major research universities to help Virginia become the nation’s leader in developing new and emerging energy technologies. |
| EDUCATION | |
| I think we do four things. The first is we start early with children that are at risk, because if a child shows up for kindergarten and they’re prepared to learn and they begin their education in a strong way and pass third-grade reading, there’s a good probability that they’ll ultimately succeed and graduate from high school. If they show up not prepared to learn and they struggle, they may never catch up, and when they don’t catch up by third grade there’s a statistically great chance that they won’t graduate from high school. So the best investment we can make is preK education for every student. … The second thing that we need to be doing is career-track education. We know that a large number of students will not graduate from college, but they need good careers and we need them in the workforce, and they need to understand there are things they can do with a high school education or a year or two of community college training that can provide them with … jobs that are not going to be outsourced that we can really use and will need in the Virginia workforce. … In addition, we need to make sure that kids understand the opportunities available to them and how what they’re learning relates to what they can do in the future. I think that we can do that through internship and mentorship programs, and I think it’s very important that the communities get involved. … And then finally, for students that are going to go on to college, and even for those that aren’t that may go into technical fields, it’s very important that we make science exciting at a very young age. If you don’t really like science and aren’t turned on to science and math when you are 10 and 12, it’s unlikely that you’re going to decide at 18 to go into a field that’s engineering- or science-based. | We need to continue making an increasing financial investment in public education and we’re committed to doing that. … Second, we’ve got to spend our educational resources more wisely. … We’ve proposed boosting classroom spending 1 percent per year over the next four years. If we can accomplish that goal we’ll increase classroom spending from 61 percent to 65 percent of our current educational budget, and we’ll take $484 million a year of our current educational resources and move them from the central office to the classroom where we’ve proposed to use them to boost teacher pay to the national average [to] make sure we have the best teachers in the classroom. We’ve proposed using that money to help reduce class sizes. We’ve proposed using that money to help improve classroom textbooks and technology. … We also think choice is an important part of improving public education. … Too often we end up teaching to the middle, and we leave students out on both ends, and I think we need to change that model to provide more educational choices for parents and for students. For those children that want to go on and get that four-year, six-year, eight-year college degree, we need to challenge them more; they need more AP, and more IB, and more duel enrollment, and more Governor’s Schools and more charter schools. … But on the other end, we also understand that there are students who want to learn a skill, learn a trade to support themselves and their family for a lifetime, and there’s also value in that. … And then lastly, we need to do more to hold students accountable—to make sure that they’re learning the things they need to know to compete in the global marketplace of the 21st century. We need to hold school systems and administrators and teachers accountable to make sure that they’re providing our kids with the education that they need. We need to reward them when they’re doing that, so we put forth a series of proposals that support incentive pay and performance pay and merit pay for teachers and for administrators. |
| SAME-SEX MARRIAGE | |
| I did not vote in favor of [the Marshall-Newman amendment, which banned same-sex marriage and civil unions of any kind]. Our constitution is supposed to provide protections for citizens, not take away rights. | I think marriage should be between a man and a woman, and I do not support same-sex marriage. |
| GUN CONTROL | |
| I think we do need to close the gun show loophole; it doesn’t make any sense to me that we haven’t. It is so easy now with technology to check somebody’s background that that needs to be a requirement at those gun shows. If the state of Virginia has to provide somebody there with a computer to do it, then we should do that, but we need to make sure that we keep guns out of the hands of criminals and deranged people. | I think the gun-related issue that arose out of the Virginia Tech shooting primarily dealt with the fact that, at the time, Virginia was not reporting to federal authorities the names of individuals who had been adjudicated mentally incompetent and deemed to be a danger to themselves or others. … Gov. Kaine closed that loophole through an executive order. The General Assembly subsequently closed that loophole through legislation that I not only supported, but was a part of my legislative package in 2008. |
| GANGS | |
| It’s absolutely essential that we support youth activities, and one of the reasons that I’m promoting mentorship and internship programs is that I think that getting grownups that have careers involved in the school systems and providing mentorship to these young people will help hopefully never allow the gang movement to continue to grow. | First of all, we would like to be able to provide additional funding for Virginia’s regional gang task forces so that they can be more aggressive in identifying and infiltrating and disrupting gangs across the state. Second, we’ve proposed increasing penalties for people involved in gang-related crimes and gang-related violence to send the message that we really do take this seriously. Third, we’ve proposed some specific proposals that zero in on methamphetamine drug use, because that’s one of the ways across the state that many of these gangs are making money; it’s through cooking and selling methamphetamine to our kids. … And then lastly, we want to do more to implement programs that are designed to divert young people away from gangs and get them involved in more positive alternatives. |
| HEALTH CARE | |
| We need an environment where everyone has access to obtaining health insurance. It is a national issue, and it would be best if it was solved at the national level. In the Kaine Administration, we did what we could to try and expand programs to insure the most vulnerable citizens in the community, the poorest citizens. We added insurance for pregnant moms; we tried to include as many of them as possible because, frankly, it’s a wise investment. If they get prenatal care during their pregnancy, the chances of having problems in the pregnancy and then ending up with expensive costs with a newborn child are reduced. … And we’ve tried to encourage small businesses to provide insurance by coming up with some innovative programs that we just couldn’t get through the General Assembly because the House delegates wouldn’t let it out. But the state has got to also encourage healthy lifestyles. We’ve done that with our own state employees. We have programs that encourage healthy living, that help pay for preventative efforts, things to keep people healthy. But as a state we need to really emphasize it, and we need to make sure that our children are learning healthy eating in schools, that they’re getting exercise in schools, that they’re getting training on what is healthy and what isn’t. | We’ve put forth a program called our Healthy Virginia Families program that focuses on what we call smart health care choices. … We’ve proposed a number of reforms in Virginia’s Medicaid program, which is of course our largest state-run health insurance program, and also a number of changes to help improve access to community-based mental health care services. We have proposed a series of changes to Virginia’s Certificate of Public Need laws that we think will help increase competition, give consumers more health care choices and reduce costs. We’ve proposed expanding state funding—when we get the economy moving again—for community health centers and free clinics and other programs that provide health care services to the uninsured. We’ve proposed some programs that will help increase the number of doctors and nurses and other health care professionals in medically underserved areas. … We’ve got a number of changes with respect to the development of improved medical records technologies that we think will help reduce health care costs. We’ve proposed a number of changes to the tort liability system that we think will help reduce health care costs. We’ve proposed an expansion of group purchasing pools for small business owners and sole proprietors that will help make health insurance more affordable. We’ve proposed changes to Virginia’s health insurance laws to allow people to purchase more basic health plans that are free of a lot of the state-mandated benefit coverages that tend to drive up costs. We’ve proposed tax credits for small business owners who provide health insurance to uninsured workers. |
