Welcome to the 2022 Virginia General Assembly Periodic Updates!

The legislative outlook may be a little different this year, but there are reasons to be optimistic. Waste reduction legislation has been gaining traction around the country and we have a few bills to follow here in Virginia!  

But,  this email is going to get you primed for the next 60 days, and remind you about how you can get ahold of your legislator, how you can tweet at them, as needed, remind you about our legislative tracker that is usually reserved for bills having to do with litter and recycling, but honestly we are always interested in the big picture of Virginia’s environment, and believe that everything is connected–Economy, Environment, Equity, and Environmental Health! 

Of Note: you may have a new Senator or Delegate since the election to make sure you know who your elected official is by checking here.

Our friends at Virginia Grassroots have a great list of all the legislators’ twitter handles and email addresses so that you can ping them as needed. Don’t forget to thank them when they vote for or champion GOOD legislation!  Save this link, although we will try to remember to put it in all our missives. 

Speaking of good legislation–there are 3 EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility) bills, a bottle bill, some good energy efficiency enabling legislation, some quality wildlife corridor legislation and funding opportunities and more but we’ll start laying those out in future emails once they are all assigned to committees, and we know more about them, because honestly, it is like drinking from a firehose. 

Let’s go right to a bill being heard TOMORROW!

We are a little curious/concerned about this bill (SB 250) because we are a county with an aging “Waste To Energy” facility, “Ash generated by incinerators and energy recovery facilities (also known as INCINERATORS THAT BURN YOUR TRASH SO IT SEEMS LIKE IT JUST DISAPPEARS INSTEAD OF TURNING IT INTO TOXIC ASH AND GAS)  that are subject to this section shall be exempted from the annual fees assessed under this section.”

This bill also increases the fee for a composting facility from $1,200 to $5,500. Do we really want to make it somehow cheaper to burn trash and organics, and more expensive for localities to compost, because it’s already basically commercially impossible due to the lack of affordable land for a facility in Northern VA, as well as ENDLESS HOA restrictions about simple backyard composters. We are in the game of reducing barriers and increasing access to solid waste disposal. This bill will be heard in The Senate Agriculture Committee (committee members linked here–save for future reference–this is a busy committee for enviro stuff!)  tomorrow (1/18/22) so please do contact Senator Surovell to ask him about it! 

As we add more bills into our “support” and “not support” list,  plus some more that we are watching, they will be up on our LitterFreeVA.org page and bills will be added and updated on a once they are assigned to committee.  We’re a little short staffed this year so if you want real time information on all the bills at any moment, you’ll want to go right to the source–The General Assembly Website. 

Finally there is the provocative appointment of former and brief EPA administrator, Andrew Wheeler, Coal and Plastic schill for Former President Trump as the Commonwealth’s Secretary of Natural and HIstoric Resources. We got to encounter Mr Wheeler here in Fairfax when he turned up at the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors public hearing on the $.05 bag fee and tried to talk up his “good work” while at EPA (video.)  Needless to say, we and some of our friends on the Board of Supervisors were not impressed.  Mr Wheeler’s resume tells us all we need to know about how he would protect our natural and historic resources but we’d like to remind you that cabinet appointments at that level still need to be voted on by the legislature, so please call your Delegate and your Senator and let them know that Virginia’s billion dollar+ industries of fishing, hiking, farming,  agritourism and more,  as well as our historic tourism are worth more to us than Mr Wheeler’s relationships with big polluters.  

Oh, and Virginia trying to get out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative? That  is a whole other email and blog post,  but luckily that looks like it will take a court order so we have some time with that one. Suffice it to say though–we do not want to leave RGGI!

But, here’s the thing– We need to be playing offense at the same time we’re playing defense. There’s a thing in hockey where you pull your goalie out and have them play offense in order to have more skaters on the ice but that leaves your goal untended. We can’t be distracted by the big things like Andrew Wheeler and RGGI,  and some of the other egregious threats to the environment, and not pay attention to the things happening quietly, right under our noses.

Eyes on the prize, friends, and the prize is Virginia. It is Virginia’s environment, business climate, school system, and its recent movement toward human and civil rights, increasing the minimum wage so people can afford to work and live and contribute to the Commonwealth,  and all the work that we all have done in the last several years to move Virginia forward in so many areas, not just environmental–because it is all connected! 

And finally, we’ll leave you with this thought, on this important day of commitment to Civil Rights, and Public Service, and beg not for something as banal as donations or shares or clicks, but that you pay attention this year and really stay on your elected officials at the local level, state level and national level because who knows what our communities, our state, our country, our climate, our world– will look like in the next 5 years if we don’t:

“Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.” John Stuart Mill, 1867

Stay healthy, sustainable, and loud.