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Va. higher education institutions weigh in on Youngkin’s budget cuts
Governor Youngkin signed off on the budget on Friday and cut $900 million. Youngkin is pushing pause on capital projects at 10 higher education facilities, to the tune of over $600 million. Some of that money would have gone to Central Virginia Community College to renovate their Amherst and Campbell buildings. They were expecting an estimated $50 million in funds.
After another veto, Virginia Democrats vow to return next year with contraceptive protections
Governor Glenn Youngkin has again vetoed legislation Virginia Democrats say will protect abortion access from future U.S. Supreme Court action. Republicans feared it would open up doctors to legal liability, but the bill’s authors disagree. Senator Ghazala Hashmi told Radio IQ Monday that in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, states need to protect contraception in case federal protections are struck. But Governor Glenn Youngkin disagreed.
After Youngkin veto of data center bill, Democratic state senator says governor is ‘misguided’
A measure that would have required developers to study proposed data centers’ impacts on their surroundings has died, at least for this year. Gov. Glenn Youngkin, after a back-and-forth with the General Assembly, vetoed the bill late last week. Youngkin wrote in his veto on Friday that data center decisions belong in the localities where they are proposed. Sen. Adam Ebbin, D-Alexandria, said Monday that his legislation would have benefited those localities by providing important information.
Youngkin signs bill to protect local pharmacies in Virginia
Governor Glenn Youngkin has signed into law a bill that creates a single pharmacy benefit manager for the state's Medicaid program. The legislation, part of the Save Local Pharmacies Act, will take effect on July 1, 2025. The move follows a broader effort to rein in the influence of PBMs, which are third-party companies that negotiate drug prices between manufacturers and insurers. Some of the largest PBMs, including Caremark (CVS Health), Express Scripts (Cigna), and OptumRx (UnitedHealth Group), also own pharmacies, a practice critics say creates a conflict of interest.
Energy storage bills among Youngkin’s vetoes
Gov. Glenn Youngkin has vetoed legislation that would have raised the targets for how much new energy storage the commonwealth’s two largest electric utilities must propose adding over the next two decades. Energy storage facilities store electricity during off-peak hours when it’s cheaper to generate and deploy it during high-demand periods when it would be more expensive to generate otherwise.
Right-to-contraception bills highlight key reproductive health care debate in this year’s elections
Contraception access is an issue resonating loudly within Virginia’s public and political spheres this year and last week, it manifested through state lawmakers contrasting Virginia’s twice-failed attempt to protect access to birth control medications against a similar measure that recently sailed through neighboring Tennessee’s legislature. For the second year in a row, Gov. Glenn Youngkin vetoed a right-to-contraception bill carried by Del. Cia Price, D-Newport News, who took to social media over the weekend to highlight how, unlike in the commonwealth, Tennessee lawmakers were able to come together and pass a bipartisan bill on the issue.
VMI’s Board of Visitors selects new leadership, as Wins’ tenure closes
After several days of meetings that began Friday, the Virginia Military Institute Board of Visitors selected new leadership. It also voted in an acting superintendent to replace Major General Cedric Wins whose contract was not renewed earlier this year after criticism of DEI initiatives he supported. The meetings were Wins’ last. Brigadier General Dallas Clark was selected to replace him on an interim basis as the board continues its search for a permanent superintendent. James Inman, a Younkin appointee, was also voted in as the new Board of Visitor's president.
State investigating potential cancer cluster in Scott County amid cases of pediatric cancer
After 14 rounds of chemotherapy, six weeks of radiation and two major surgeries — including a jaw reconstruction — Oliver Hensley is finally in remission from an aggressive type of cancer. He was just 5 years old and in kindergarten when he was diagnosed. His treatments spanned the course of a year. “You would never think that you have to worry that your child is going to have cancer,” Kayla Hensley, Oliver’s mom, said during a phone interview.
Youngkin keeps bar high for weight loss drugs under Medicaid
A year ago, after Gov. Glenn Youngkin persuaded the General Assembly to limit access to weight loss drugs for people in Virginia’s Medicaid program, Dr. Susan Wolver saw immediate consequences for her patients struggling with obesity. People who had lost 100 pounds with help from medication suddenly lost access to the drug because they had shed so much weight they fell beneath the state’s new threshold for body mass index. They regained weight and other medical conditions returned, such as high blood pressure and pre-diabetes. . . . The General Assembly tried to intervene this year, adopting a lower body mass index threshold to quality for the drugs under Medicaid, but Youngkin had the last word by vetoing the new provision of the revised budget that he signed on Friday.
Yancey: Jobless workers in Emporia are paying the price for nation’s inability to deal with high housing costs
Emporia took a hard blow last week when the Georgia-Pacific plywood mill announced it’s closing, leaving 550 people out of work. That follows another hard blow last year, when the Boar’s Head Provision Co. meat plant in nearby Jarratt in Greensville County closed. No community wants to lose a major employer; between them, Emporia and Greensville County have now lost two in less than a year’s time. These two plant closings are unrelated — Boar’s Head was linked to a listeria outbreak that led to 10 deaths across the country. That’s a tragedy, but it may not directly stem from a public policy choice. However, Georgia-Pacific cited national declines in homebuilding and homebuying, and those are very much connected to public policy.