For the incumbent in the state Senate district anchored in the Historic Triangle, Thomas K. Norment Jr., the issue in this year’s election is which party controls the chamber. For his opponent, the issue is Norment himself.
The challenger, former New Kent County Treasurer Herb Jones, says Norment, R-James City County, is too beholden to special interests and has used his elected position to enrich himself.
Norment, the Senate majority leader, said attacking an incumbent is what challengers often feel they must do and that he considers his opponent a nice man. He also praised Jones’ years of service in the U.S. Army.
First elected to the Senate in 1991 after a term as a James City County supervisor, Norment has led the Republican caucus since 2008 and in 2016 followed the lead of his mentor, the late Hunter Andrews, by adding a co-chairmanship of the powerful Finance Committee to his post as majority leader.
“My first and foremost concern will be the commonwealth’s 2020-2022 biennial budget,” Norment said. “We are already experiencing quote-unquote unanticipated expenditures related to Medicaid, although I warned about these costs … it will be my top priority to structure the budget to prevent the ballooning expense of this scheme from encroaching on necessary funding for our schools and public safety.”
Jones would introduce a bill saying that when firefighters have cancer, insurers and the state Workers Compensation Commission should presume the disease was work-related. Current state law says that presumption applies when firefighters suffer from Leukemia or pancreatic, prostate, rectal, throat, ovarian, breast, colon, brain, or testes cancers.
“Firefighters have been fighting for 15 years for this. Firefighters have gone into bankruptcy or died because they didn’t have the medical coverage they should have from workers comp,” Jones said.
Jones also supports universal pre-K, regulated legal sales of marijuana, a $15-an-hour minimum wage and increasing the threshold of income that is subject to state taxes.
But the top issue this election is his opponent, he said.
“Tommy Norment is asleep on the job,” Jones said. “There’s the Tommy tax; Tommy was the highest paid adjunct professor in Virginia, he’s the commissioner of accounts,” Jones said, referring the surcharge on sales taxes in the Historic Triangle that Norment pushed as a way to finance the region’s tourism efforts, but that Jones says looks like a public bailout of Colonial Williamsburg.
Norment said the top issue this year is control of the General Assembly.
“Voters need to understand that if Republicans were to lose even a single Senate seat, the policies of Virginia’s government would emulate California … the repeal of right-to-work, the doubling of the minimum wage, and a massive expansion of social spending would immediately end Virginia’s status as one of the states in which to locate or operate a business,” Norment said.
“Virginia’s reputation for being a pro-business state with a record of conservative fiscal management is, by far, what matters most to me,” Norment said, asked about his basic approach to politics. He said Virginians’ quality of life and the state’s ability to provide public services depend on businesses thriving and the government’s fiscal soundness.
The district, anchored in James City County, stretches from New Kent County in the west and King and Queen County in the north to take in one precinct in Hampton and two voters in Surry County. It is strongly Republican, giving Corey Stewart 58% of its votes in the 2018 U.S. Senate race and Ed Gillespie 60% in the 2017 gubernatorial race.
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Dave Ress, 757-247-4535, dress@dailypress.com
