Every now and then, a Virginia delegate or senator proposes legislation that’s honest, sincere, and makes perfect sense. Sometimes those bills close silly loopholes or resolve strange inconsistencies. Occasionally, they cure glaring ills or prevent highway robbery.
And as often as not, such efforts suffer a quick death in Richmond. The 2018 General Assembly is barely a week old, and already we have evidence of that.
For example, let’s begin with a wholly righteous piece of lawmaking by Sens. Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax City, and Dave Suetterlein, R-Roanoke County. You could put this one in the “prevent highway robbery” category.
The robbery in question is arguably the greatest single heist in Virginia history. Critics have estimated it could total $1 billion, maybe more. It was accomplished via another law the General Assembly passed in 2015.
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The sponsor of that one was Sen. Frank Wagner, R-Virginia Beach, and back in 2015 it was denounced as a scam and a fraud and a swindle. Wednesday on the House of Delegates floor, Del. Sam Rasoul, D-Roanoke, blasted it as “corrupt.”
It was enacted at the behest of Dominion Energy and (to a lesser extent) Appalachian Power. The former often gets special consideration in Richmond because it’s (by far) the top corporate donor to political campaigns.
As regulated utilities, these corporations enjoy guaranteed-by-law profits.
Wagner’s measure froze the “base rates” on electric bills, which make up about half of a typical consumer’s monthly payment. For Appalachian customers, the freeze lasts through 2020; for Dominion customers, through 2022.
Worse, it also halted the State Corporation Commission’s every-other-year reviews of the utilities’ profits. With those, the commission could order refunds to consumers if the utilities earned “excess” profits.
(From 2009 to 2015, the SCC ordered excess-profits refunds totaling $830 million.)
The utilities argued they needed the 2015 law to prepare themselves for potential future uncertainties that could result from former President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan. Because that was undone by President Donald Trump, the law’s justification is nil.
Yet thanks to Wagner’s law, Appalachian and Dominion have kept 100 percent of any excess profits they raked in.
Petersen sponsored the same bill last year; the legislature killed it within 72 hours of convening. This year it took them 96 hours.
Supposedly there’s another bill in the works, sponsored by Sen. Richard Saslaw, D-Fairfax. He’s gotten more in campaign contributions from Dominion ($318,000) than any other lawmaker. So don’t hold your breath.
Suetterlein was unavailable for comment Wednesday, but here’s a statement his aide emailed me:
“The rate freeze was a mistake in 2015 and so is allowing the utilities to write the remedy in 2018. Virginia families and businesses were overcharged by the unreviewed rates and their money should be returned to them, not spent on other utility projects. Today’s vote was disappointing, but expected and I will continue working to reinstate the constitutionally required review of electric rates and for Virginians to receive the refunds they are owed.”
The second measure to die a quick death was a gun bill sponsored by Sen. Adam Ebbin, D-Alexandria. It arose from a weird inconsistency.
Right now it’s against the law for a concealed-carry permit holder to drink in public while carrying a concealed gun. But it’s not against the law for someone to drink in public while carrying openly.
Ebbin sought to address the discrepancy — at least in part — by making it a class 1 misdemeanor for someone to openly carry a loaded firearm in public while under the influence of alcohol or drugs. This is the third year in a row he’s sponsored various iterations of the bill. The Senate Courts of Justice Committee killed it 9-6.
Ebbin noted it wouldn’t necessarily prevent an open-carrier from having a drink; but they couldn’t drink to the point they were obviously drunk. Opponents criticized the standard as “nebulous.”
“I would hope we can agree on certain baseline public safety expectations. And among them, people under the influence shouldn’t be carrying loaded firearms,” Ebbin told me.
“The National Rifle Association and the Virginia Citizens Defense League and many of my colleagues don’t seem to accept that baseline. That is troubling to me.”
Our third good-but-dead example is related to the first one. It was a bill sponsored by Petersen and Sen. Jeremy McPike, D-Prince William. It would ban political contributions from public service corporations — such as Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power. There’s a good reason to do that.
According to the nonpartisan, nonprofit Virginia Public Access Project, which tracks such things, Dominion Energy has made more campaign donations to Virginia politicians than any other single company. We’re talking about millions of dollars.
VPAP puts the campaign donations tally from Dominion at just over $11 million since 1996. No other business entity comes even close. (Tobacco products producer Altria — once known as Philip Morris — ranks second on the list of corporate donors, with $6.3 million in the same time frame.) Appalachian Power has donated $2.2 million, according to VPAP.
And that’s fueled great suspicion throughout the commonwealth that Dominion has used the profits it makes from ratepayers to rig passage of laws like the one in 2015, which delivered a potential windfall of hundreds of millions of dollars.
That bill got killed Tuesday in a 12-2 committee vote. Sens. Creigh Deeds, D-Bath, and Amanda Chase, R-Chesterfield, were its only supporters.
When you think about it, those campaign donations were a hell of an investment. Or, as Del. Rasoul might say: “Corrupt.”