by Dick Hall-Sizemore
Glenn Youngkin is quickly learning that being governor is not like being CEO of a large corporation. Just because the guy at the top wants something done does not mean that it will be done.
One of Youngkin’s campaign promises was to require local governments to have a referendum before they could approve a real property tax rate after a reassessment that would result in more than a one percent increase in property tax revenues. Under current law, the local government must have a separate public hearing only if it does not propose to reduce the rate to a level that would produce an increase of no more than one percent in the property tax revenues.
The Senate bill that would have implemented this promise, SB 620, Cosgrove, R-Chesapeake, was killed by the Senate Finance Committee on a 12-4 vote. The House counterpart, HB 1010, Durant, R-Stafford, had a different story.
It passed the House as a substitute. The substitute bill was significantly different from the original bill. It would require that, if a locality were going to have the public hearing required because of an increase in assessments and the governing body indicated that it did not intend to “equalize” the tax rate, the advertisement of the public hearing had to be published on a different day and in a different notice than the notice for the required public hearing on the budget.
This was an innocuous requirement. Yet, the bill was reported out of the Finance Committee by a 11-10 vote and passed by the full House by a vote of 53-46. In both cases, Democrats cast all the “no” votes. The average citizen or causal observer could be forgiven for wondering why Democrats opposed such innocuous legislation. At the most, they may wonder why the Democrats were not content that the bill had been watered down from its original form, which they strongly opposed, to something that was harmless. Why not give a freshman delegate a win, even though the bill in its substitute form was largely meaningless?
The answer reveals two lessons: 1. To understand most of what happens at the legislature, one needs to be there; and 2. Even if one is there, one needs to be cognizant of legislative strategies.
The administration made several mistakes with this bill. First, the bill sat on the House Finance Committee docket for almost a month with no action being taken, not even referral to subcommittee. To veterans in and around the legislature, that is a sign of trouble. Then, the chair of the Finance Committee called a special meeting of the committee, after the committee had supposedly finished its docket in the run-up to the deadline for committees to act on House bills, for the sole purpose of taking up this bill. The antennae of Democrats very likely went up at this development. The bill’s patron presented the bland substitute, which many members and lobbyists were seeing for the first time. Appearing in support of the bill was Matt Moran, special advisor to Governor Youngkin. Moran said that the bill was a priority for the governor.
The Democrats were on high alert and openly skeptical of the patron’s claim that the bill was needed to bring more transparency to the process by requiring separate notice of the tax rate public hearing rather than “burying” that announcement in the notice of the general hearing on the budget. Behind this skepticism was the legislative notion of a “vehicle,” which is a bill that can be amended later to incorporate a proposal that had met opposition earlier. The amendment can take the form of rewriting the current bill completely or “tacking on” a related proposal. In any event, the amendment cannot be unrelated to the original subject of the bill. In keeping with the constitutional requirement that “no law shall embrace more than one object,” in legislative parlance, any amendment must be “germane.”
Addressing the question directly, Delegate Vivian Watts, D-Fairfax, asked if any future amendment returning to the referendum question would be germane. Delegatge Robert Orrock, R-Caroline, the Republicans’ unofficial expert on the rules, replied that germaneness relates to the original bill; therefore, there could be floor amendments on the question of a referendum. Delegate Sally Hudson D-Charlottesville, with somewhat of a straight face, expressed her perplexity that this substitute bill could be a priority of the Governor.
There is another saying around the legislature: even if a bill does not seem dangerous on its face, “When you see a snake, kill it.” The Democrats saw this bill as a vehicle to ultimately get the Governor’s proposal onto the Senate floor. They saw it as a snake and tried to kill it. They just did not have the votes in the House.
Democrats in the Senate had the same reaction to the bill. On Tuesday, when the bill was being considered in Senate Finance, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that Senator Creigh Deeds, D-Bath, asked, somewhat rhetorically, “So, a referendum could be added back to this bill, I guess, before it gets to where it needs to go?” The committee then proceeded to kill the bill on a vote of 9-6. Later, it agreed to reconsider its vote. After Charles Kennington, Deputy Secretary of Finance, assured the committee, “The governor does not intend to pursue any amendments to the bill as it is in its current form,” the committee voted unanimously to report the substitute bill.
The other “Day One” item that is dead is Youngkin’s proposal to prohibit schools from teaching “inherently divisive concepts.” A Senate committee killed SB 570, Kiggans, R-Virginia Beach, which would have implemented the proposal. Its House counterpart, HB 1068 (Cordoza, R-Hampton), was never taken up in the Republican-majority House Education Committee. Finally, as reported by the Richmond-Times Dispatch, neither the Republican budget bill in the House nor the Democratic budget bill in the Senate includes the budget language requested by the governor that would have enacted this prohibition.
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