Former Charlottesville mayor and city council member David Toscano was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in 2005, succeeding Mitch Van Yahres, who had held the 57th District seat since 1981.
On January 17, Delegate Toscano spoke to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about his legislative priorities for 2011. Two topics dominated the conversation, transparency and eminent domain.
Transparency
Toscano described two bills he has introduced to improve the transparency of the legislative process.
“I’ve got a wonderful bill [HB 1869] that would require conferees on the budget to disclose anything in the conference report that was not in either budget or any legislation that has been slipped into the conference report that was rejected by either body during the legislative session,” Toscano said.
He explained that his proposal would do two things.
First, he said, “it would alert delegates and senators about new things that are popping into the budget at the last minute, where they’re trying to legislate through the budget.
Second, he went on, “it would diminish the likelihood that last-minute earmarks would be placed in the budget at the request of an individual conferee that had not been heard by the entire body.”
Toscano’s other transparency bill, HB 1870, addresses tax subsidies provided to companies with the understanding that they will create jobs.
The bill, he said, requires the companies to “disclose the kind of jobs that they’ve actually created, where those jobs are, and whether any jobs have been taken from other parts of Virginia to create the new jobs in the places where they’ve been created.”
Asked about state Senator Ralph Smith’s proposal, SB 867, which would mandate that the budget be put on line and made available for public scrutiny for 72 hours before it can be voted on, Toscano said, “I think that anything like that really needs to happen down here.”
He added that “the problem is, we have a very thick budget -- hundreds of pages -- and it’s plunked on our desk and we have two hours to decide whether we want to adopt it.”
Toscano noted that “there are a lot of things in those budgets that people are not aware of and they’re voting in the dark. That’s not the way to run a democracy.
He said he was not sure if 72 hours is the “right time, but we need to have some advance time to look at this” in the General Assembly.
Eminent domain
After correctly predicting that Delegate Harvey Morgan’s bill, HB 1443, to decriminalize marijuana possession “will not get to the floor” and saying that he does not have as high a priority for legalizing industrial hemp as his predecessor did, Toscano answered questions about pending legislation on property rights and eminent domain reform.
“We did a lot on eminent domain three or four years ago,” he said, when a bill “that ultimately I didn’t feel all that good about” was approved. Despite his own misgivings, he added, “it’s what the legislature wanted and so it got passed.”
This year, he noted, “we hear renewed efforts to make it a constitutional amendment. I’m very leery about that. I’m not going to support it.”
Not just the eminent domain proposals, he said, “I’m very leery about amending the constitution, anyway.”
There are “five or six” proposals in the General Assembly this year, he said, “to take statutes in the Virginia code that really are not controversial and make them constitutional amendments. The right to work law, for example, is on a docket this morning. They’re trying to make that a constitutional amendment. Before we know it, we’re going to be constitutionalizing everything.”
Referring back to the Supreme Court’s 2005 eminent domain ruling, Kelo v. City of New London, Toscano argued that he does not “think we have the problem with Kelo in Virginia that some people think. I think our statute is pretty good. I think it protects people, and yet you’ve got to give localities and instrumentalities of the state the ability to do something so they can build roads and public facilities.”
Toscano expressed concerns over the current proposals by concluding: “If a constitutional amendment gets passed, my worry is we won’t be able to invest in public infrastructure to the extent that we need to in Virginia.”
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Comments
I am greatly concerend that "invest[ing] in public infrastructure" (toward the end of the article) could be code for taking away people's property and turning it into parks, schools, swim pools, roads, or whatever else the political class wants. Del. Toscano says he's leery of making property rights incorporated into the Virginia constitution, yet these rights are already protected by the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution. Where is the consistency?
I am greatly concerend that "invest[ing] in public infrastructure" (toward the end of the article) could be code for taking away people's property and turning it into parks, schools, swim pools, roads, or whatever else the political class wants. Del. Toscano says he's leery of making property rights incorporated into the Virginia constitution, yet these rights are already protected by the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution. Where is the consistency?
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