Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 15, 1995 TAG: 9501270009
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: G-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARGIE FISHER EDITORIAL WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
- Virginia faces ever-greater demands for money to support its prisons and prisoners, the House Appropriations Committee heard Monday ...
- The boom years for Virginia colleges have, from all indications, come to an end ... Sen. Hunter B. Andrews, D-Hampton, told leaders of Virginia colleges that it is the still-uncertain availability of money [that is the problem]. He warned the institutions that they had better hone their lobbying skills ...
- Roanoke would go in the hole about $6 million a year if a tax proposal [to repeal the gross-receipts tax localities impose on businesses, professions and occupations] should be implemented. [The city's finance director] said the only way the city could handle such a loss would be to `throw education right out the window ... ' He said the people of Virginia and the General Assembly should be warned how such sleight-of-hand proposals ... will affect cities such as Roanoke. He termed the impact disastrous.
- The General Assembly was urged Monday to close the loopholes in conflict-of-interest, lobbying and campaign-financing laws to re-establish public faith in government ...
- A Galax elementary-school principal pleaded eloquently [for the state] to consider not just the routing for [an Appalachian Power Co.] high-voltage power line in Southwest Virginia but also the greater scope of social issues that such lines represent.
- The General Assembly got local governments into a financial mess, so it's up to the General Assembly to help them out, local-government officials are saying ... Del. C. Richard Cranwell, D-Roanoke County, will be among a key group of legislators pushing for a regional revenue-sharing plan. Cranwell said such a plan has `lots of possibilities' and ... is as practical as any form of general tax increase the General Assembly might consider to help central cities out of their financial problems.
- A wide-ranging study of Virginia problems, ranging from crime to fiscal growth, was announced today by the lieutenant governor ... [The lieutenant governor], who is expected to announce his candidacy for governor soon, vehemently denied that there was any political motivation behind his project.
- The State Capitol is reeling this week from yet another great fiscal crisis. The price of a cup of coffee at Chicken's Snack Shop has gone up to 16 cents after having remained a dime since 1948.
Well, that last ought to be a dead giveaway. A 16-cent cup of coffee hasn't been available at the State Capitol, or any place else that I know of, for years. The above dispatches from Richmond are not news stories filed by our reporters from the 1995 General Assembly that opened Wednesday, but blurbs from stories I filed as a reporter covering the legislature 20 years ago.
I happened across them recently while searching through old 1975-76 clips for a story unrelated to the legislature, and was struck not by how much has changed but by how much seems constant.
Hunter Andrews and Dick Cranwell in their places. The recital of the issues:
Prison costs; higher education's budget woes; cities' cries of pending financial disaster; gun control; child abuse; the death penalty; drug abuse; the national health-insurance debate; tax inequities; gambling propositions (pari-mutuel betting in the '70s, riverboat gambling in the '90s).
Actually, much is different.
That lieutenant governor announcing the ``plan for tomorrow'' study so Virginia could ``prove itself again the master of its destiny'' was Republican John Dalton. (The state's current lieutenant governor, Democrat Don Beyer, seems no less interested, though, in launching task-force studies of wide-ranging problems - politically unmotivated, don'tcha know.)
Republican legislators now are near parity in both the House and Senate with the Democrats who have historically controlled the legislature. After the elections this November, many predict, Republicans will become the majority in one if not both chambers. But in a story I wrote in 1975, state GOP Chairman George McMath predicted that Republicans would take control of the House at the next election. (McMath cited - what else? - ``widespread disenchantment with the liberal philosophy of the Democratic Party.'')
Reading through my old clips, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. It's discouraging that so many problems facing the commonwealth never seem to be resolved, that so many issues are getting long in the tooth, that debate about them is depressingly familiar - with only the money figures subject to change.
In the '75 words of then-Del. Archie Campbell of Wytheville, ``it's the daggondest system I've ever seen.''
But each year about now, after having left Richmond in 1990, I get to missing the hurly-burly of the General Assembly, get to feeling I've been gone too long and am losing touch. What's to miss? Probably, if I were to return 20 years from now, it would be the same-old, same-old.
by CNB