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BILLS STILL ALIVE
Don’t let the long list fool you. While the majority of the bills we’ve been following have either passed both chambers or seem well on their way to doing so, some of the most impactful bills are now dead, and others have been amended into meekness.
The entire category of Utility Reform got emptied out into the dumpster in Senate Commerce and Labor, which also killed Jeff Bourne’s “right to shop” bill that would have opened up the renewable energy market. They are all now found under “Dead and Buried” at the end.
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Virginia is, famously, a state that prides itself on being business-friendly. That makes it all the more interesting that a number of bills favoring consumers have made it through the House. Democrats have led the charge, but several of the bills earned bipartisan support even in the face of utility opposition.
This doesn’t guarantee their luck will hold. Democrats aren’t just more numerous in the House, they are also younger and more independent-minded than the old guard Democrats in control of the Senate. The second half of the session is going to be a lot more challenging for pro-consumer legislation.
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Meanwhile, the list of bills I’ve corralled over the past week has grown to nearly 50. I’ve included the updated list here scroll down.
Unless you’re paid to lobby, you may have only a few minutes at a time to contact legislators about the bills you want to see passed (or in some cases, defeated). So how do you set priorities?
Let me propose three criteria for you to lobby for a bill:
Clean energy advocates expected this legislative session to feature fewer initiatives of interest, in part because of the shorter session and bill limits for legislators. Good news (I guess): the number of bills we are following is growing.