The New Virginia Way

Virginia Beach Mayor Will Sessoms

Virginia Beach Mayor Will Sessoms

In the cause of chronicling the endless pageantry of corruption and abuse of power in Virginia, we turn today to an article in the Virginian Pilot:

[Virginia Beach] Mayor Will Sessoms pleaded no contest Monday to a single misdemeanor charge of violating the state’s Conflict of Interest Act. The remaining four charges against him were dropped as part of a plea agreement with a special prosecutor.

The deal included prosecutor Mike Doucette’s recommendation that the mayor not be removed from office and that Sessoms make a donation of $1,000 to the Virginia Coalition for Open Government. A $500 fine – the maximum penalty for the Class 3 misdemeanor – was suspended. …

Doucette said he recommended that the mayor not be removed from office because he didn’t believe the circumstances called for it.

The no-contest plea stemmed from a 2011 incident in which Sessoms voted for a proposal by Madison Landing LLC to rezone a site to build 14 condominiums in Virginia Beach. While the request was unanimously approved, Sessoms cast his vote without disclosing he had served as trustee on two loans obtained by Madison Landing in the months before the vote.

For a recap of Sessoms’ conflict-of-interest embroglios, click here.

Bacon’s bottom line: Once upon a time, shady politics used to be the province of big-city and rural-courthouse political machines. But suburban skullduggery has been on the rise ever since big-time real estate development raised the stakes in Virginia’s fast-growth counties. There is huge money in real estate development, and a thicket of laws, regulations and subsidies (in the form of transportation projects that create value for newly developed land) combined with aggressive NIMBYism creates incentives for developers and their political allies to take short cuts. It’s usually difficult to spot the conflicts of interest because so many real estate entities are privately held partnerships with minimal requirements for ownership disclosure.

We don’t need more laws and penalties, but Virginia could use more transparency. One good place to start would be to require real estate partnerships to publicly file ownership interests.