York Supervisors Ponder Promoting State Legislative Agenda

By Sam Thrift Friday, October 07, 2011

Although they approved it unanimously, York County's Board of Supervisors worried their “wish list” to the General Assembly might be overlooked because the items on the list resembled requests made last year.

The supervisors' discussion centered on how to best communicate the legislation they feel needs to be passed, rather than details about the requests that make up the program. Supervisors suggested sending representatives to Richmond and finding other counties to co-sponsor legislation.

“For years we’ve talked about coordinating this stuff with our neighbors to get support,” District 1 Supervisor Walter Zaremba said. “If a delegate or senator gets our input, and there is another 10 or 12 co-sponsors to the same thing, to me, it adds weight to the argument.”

District 2 Supervisor Sheila Noll recommended writing the co-sponsored legislation requests into bills to make it easier for lawmakers to push through the General Assembly, rather than just supplying a wish list. Noll used the Predatory and Usurious Lending Practices reform, a request that all standards applied to payday lending and motor vehicle title loans be set to all loan transactions, as an example of a piece of legislation many localities are asking the state to consider in 2012.

“We need to give the General Assembly what we want in a way that is easy to read,” Noll said.

County Administrator James McReynolds asked the board to focus on the broader issues, like unfunded mandates, that have a more significant impact on how localities can do business.

“I think it’s very important that you remind the state, and our delegation, to be mindful of what they are doing to us, the localities,” McReynolds said. “I think if you hand them a specific bill with language in it, they would be more likely to carry it.”

The board passed the program, which covers 16 legislation and policy requests for the General Assembly, but said they would later pull the five pieces of legislation they felt were applicable to multiple localities to draft into a bill. The board did not discuss which of pieces of legislation they would pull.

Some of the requests that were passed include:

• An amendment that would authorize York County to adopt and enforce ordinances requiring grass and weeds to be mowed on vacant developed or undeveloped property.

• Elimination of the state local aid program, which requires localities to provide financial support to the state in the form of direct payments or through reductions in state aid to the locality.

• Changing the rules that guide taxes on travel companies such as Expedia, Orbitz and Priceline that contract with hotels to offer rooms at a discounted rate. The travel companies pay a portion of the rate to the hotel and retain a portion of the room charge for profit. As a result, localities are losing tax revenues because the transient occupancy tax is levied only on the amount received by the hotel and not the total amount of room charge paid by the consumer. The bills that would have remedied the loss of tax revenues in 2010 and 2011 were defeated. Supervisors want to show support for a similar bill, called the Transient Occupancy Tax, in 2012.

• Increasing state support for tourism advertising to remind the public that “Virginia’s historic and recreational attractions are merely an automobile ride away for millions of Americans.”

• Amending the Open Container Bill to prohibit the possession of an open container of alcohol by a passenger in a vehicle on the highway. Similar bills have been introduced every year since 2009, but none were adopted.

To see all of the 16 items the board approved, click here.

Other items discussed
The board approved a resolution to accept and appropriate a grant for the York County Sheriff’s Office from the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) Highway Safety Office for Transportation Safety Projects.

The Sheriff’s Office will receive $34,393 for Project DUI/Click It or Ticket that will go towards overtime, training and travel, two radar units, three breath-testing units and one in-car video system. The grant requires a 20 percent local in-kind match, which may be met using vehicle fuel and maintenance costs.

If you didn’t make the meeting, you can watch it by clicking here.