Lynchburg lawmakers post strong showing in Assembly

If getting bills passed is a reasonable way to measure a legislator’s success, the five delegates and one senator who represent the Lynchburg region in the General Assembly had a good year in Richmond.

As a group, 59 percent of their law-making proposals were passed, compared to 41 percent for all delegates and senators.

Years of service in the Capitol, and relationships that have been built during those years with other lawmakers and leaders, are keys to a legislator’s effectiveness. Bill totals, however, can serve as a sort of box score.

Delegates Watkins Abbitt, I-Appomattox, Kathy Byron, R-Campbell County, Ben Cline, R-Rockbridge, and Lacey Putney, I-Bedford, all were above average for bills passed in the House.

Sen. Steve Newman, R-Lynchburg, had a strong year, with 71 percent of his bills approved — some of which overcame serious obstacles.

Del. Scott Garrett, R-Lynchburg, got one of his three bills passed, a typical success rate for a freshman legislator.

Seniority counts heavily in the General Assembly, and no member has more of it than Del. Lacey Putney, who served his 49th year in the oldest legislative body in America.

Putney sponsored seven bills that passed. Four of them were the most significant bills of the session: the state budgets for 2010 plus the next two years, a change in the state retirement system that helped avoid a major tax increase, and a higher-education bond act.

Putney has sponsored the budget bills the past three years, but 2010 was “the worst I have seen in all my 49 years” because the state’s revenues actually declined, he told other House members during a floor speech.

When the budget bills from the Senate and House go into a conference committee near the end of the Assembly session, Putney is its chairman. The dozen delegates and senators in that group balance the budget, decide funding for local schools and, this year, sign off on a new kind of retirement system.

Newman sponsored 10 bills that passed. One was easy: a bill raising speed limits to 70 mph on some highways encountered little opposition, mostly because Gov. Bob McDonnell had made it one of his campaign promises.

Also, a Newman-sponsored resolution that insists convicted killer Jens Soering remain in a Virginia prison instead of being transferred to his native Germany and paroled in two years, passed unanimously in both the House and Senate.

So far, Newman has been the only Virginia official to receive a response from the U.S. Department of Justice, which is considering former Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s request that Soering be transferred. The department told Newman it was weighing arguments from German officials that it should grant Kaine’s request and ignore a revocation of the Soering transfer that McDonnell issued during his first week in office.

Less easily approved was a three-bill, education-reform package that McDonnell asked Newman to sponsor in the Senate. Those bills revised the way charter schools are set up, and set new standards for providing virtual schools through online classes to students at home. The third bill made it easier for colleges to set up laboratory schools where teachers can work on new ways to help students learn.

In the House of Delegates, each of those bills had its own sponsor and cosponsors. Newman was the sole carrier in the Senate.

After more than 40 hours of meetings with legislators and lobbyists for school boards, teachers and the state’s top education officials, the three bills were passed despite unanimous opposition from the Legislative Black Caucus.

Newman said those opponents were standing as sentinels against any changes that could re-segregate schools, and those senators and delegates should be respected for doing so.