No payoff on Lobby Day
The Assembly’s Christian Right doesn’t let science get in the way of its anti-abortion agenda
On the corner of his desk in the offices of the Virginia Legislature in Richmond, Senator Mark Obenshain (R-Harrisonburg) keeps a copy of Why One Way: Defending an Exclusive Claim in an Inclusive World by John MacArthur, an evangelical pastor whose brand of angry Christianity has made him a popular author and radio personality.
MacArthur sells books by claiming God wants us to hate everyone who’s not a fundamentalist Christian (forget that wishy-washy “love thy neighbor” stuff). As a politician, Obenshain exudes a similar God-is-on-my-side vibe, so the group of James Madison University students who filed into the Senator’s office on Pro-Choice Lobby Day weren’t expecting a compromise.
“We don’t expect to change his mind. He’s a hard-liner,” says Erin Coughlin, a JMU senior.
On Wednesday, January 28, about 200 abortion-rights advocates descended on Richmond for the annual pro-choice event. At 9:30am, 79 people from Charlottesville, Harrisonburg and southwest Virginia arrived in Richmond on a pair of chartered buses, just minutes before the JMU students were scheduled to meet Obenshain. It was bound to be an interesting session.
Last spring, Obenshain was an aspiring senator sitting on JMU’s Board of Visitors. With encouragement from Del. Bob Marshall (R-Manassas), Obenshain pushed the board in April to prohibit the school’s student health center from distributing “emergency contraception” pills without a doctor’s prescription (last month, the JMU Board of Visitors responded to student outrage by reversing the ban). In November, Obenshain won the 26th District Senate seat, and in his first session he seems poised to support Marshall’s HB 1414, which would prohibit any Virginia public university from distributing EC pills—with or without a prescription.
There are currently more than 20 bills before the General Assembly that would restrict access to abortion and birth control—such as the so-called “TRAP” legislation that would effectively close all but one abortion clinic in the Commonwealth and other bills that would require any doctor prescribing EC to students to seek parental consent. The young women who would mostly be affected by these measures don’t know what’s afoot in the legislature, contends Mandy Woodfield, a JMU senior.
“I don’t think the majority of women my age are aware their rights could be taken away,” she says.
Woodfield and her fellow student lobbyists wanted Obenshain to know that most young people support the right to choose. But no sooner did they take a seat on Obenshain’s sofa than the Senator let them know they were wasting their time.
“You and I have a fundamental difference of opinion,” Obenshain told the students. “With respect to you, I think you’re wrong.”
Obenshain sat on the edge of his desk, crossed his arms and spoke to the students in the soft voice of a shepherd coaxing wandering sheep back to the fold. During the polite but occasionally tense exchange, Obenshain told the visibly nervous students that he believed emergency contraception pills constitute abortion—and murder—because they flush a fertilized egg from the woman’s body before it attaches to the woman’s uterus. “It’s a definitional issue,” said Obenshain.
“Not according to science,” replied JMU senior Tim Howley. Pregnancy, as defined by scientists and Virginia’s Attorney General, begins with implantation, not fertilization. Emergency contraception is nothing more than a high dose of conventional birth control pills, and an advisory committee to the Federal Food and Drug Administration recommended that EC was safe enough to be sold over the counter.
Obenshain countered with his version of Pascal’s Wager. “Look at it this way,” he said. “If I’m wrong, then we’re imposing hardships on some families. If you’re wrong, then we’re taking literally millions of lives.”
Obenshain, who supports the death penalty, told the students that “people want leaders with a moral compass,” apparently referring to the 29 percent of registered voters in the 26th District who put him into office. The message was clear—college kids may know their science, but they don’t vote.
After 40 minutes, the two sides agreed to disagree. Nevertheless, the JMU students were lucky. The hallways pulsed with lobbyists, all wearing issues on their sleeves—Planned Parenthood’s army of co-eds, trial lawyers waving little red flags, health care advocates with helium balloons and fortune cookies. Most spent their time simply waiting for legislators who were stuck in meetings.
Planned Parenthood missed Albemarle Republican Delegate Rob Bell, for example. The 36-year-old Bell comes from the old school of Virginia Republicanism—cut taxes and cut the budget—and he keeps his religion private. David Nova, president of Planned Parenthood of the Blue Ridge, sees Bell as a Republican who can be reasoned with.
“He’s very smart,” says Nova. “But he’s under intense political pressure to vote with the party line on these issues.”
Last year, Bell joined Planned Parenthood in supporting a bill that would add language to the Code of Virginia stating that “contraception does not constitute abortion” and that abortion restrictions like parental consent and notification would not apply to birth control. A similar bill, SB 456, is on the table this year.
However, Bell has also introduced HB 671, a bill specifically punishing “feticide” and “fetal injury.” There are currently nine bills referencing “feticide” or “fetal injury,” which critics say are steps toward equating abortion, which is Constitutionally protected, with murder, which is not. These bills teem with Virginia’s far-Right lawmakers’ fetish-like preoccupation with the unborn fetus.
After the meetings, Planned Parenthood’s lobbyists retreated to a nearby pub for lunch. Holly Hatcher, a Charlottesvillian and director of statewide organizing for Planned Parenthood, arrived with some bad news—Marshall’s TRAP bill passed the 100-member House with 69 votes, four more than last year. The TRAP bill will likely die in the Senate again this year, but that wasn’t much consolation.
“We’re going in the wrong direction,” said Nova. “If we’re ever going to have a good vote, you’d think it would happen right after the legislators see 200 of us walking around their office. It’s scary.”—John Borgmeyer
Water into whine
Hollymead developer finds his wetlands mistake costly
The undeveloped land north of Charlottesville ain’t cheap—about $12 to $18 per square foot. But perhaps the most expensive piece of real estate of all along 29N is 17 feet of an unnamed tributary of Powell Creek, which runs through the Hollymead Town Center site.
In the fall, bulldozers cleared trees, bushes and grass alongside 2,517 feet abutting five creeks that run east to west through the Hollymead site. The problem? The State’s Department of Environmental Quality approved razing only 2,500 feet along the creeks. D’oh!
Project developer Wendell Wood says DEQ inspectors visit the site weekly, and on October 21 the State caught the mistake.
“We admitted it,” says Wood. “In situations like this we could go to court, but in this case we agreed we made a mistake. It wasn’t worth fighting over.”
Before construction companies can alter creeks or other bodies of water, they must first get permission from the DEQ. Usually, the State allows developers to destroy wetlands in one place if they promise to clean up and protect equivalent wetlands somewhere else, a process called “mitigation.” Developers may mitigate land anywhere in the State, as long as the plan meets DEQ approval.
The DEQ gave Wood permission to raze land along five streams that currently divert the site’s runoff into a holding pond. When the project is finished, those streams will live in pipes beneath the parking lot of the 165-acre site. To mitigate this damage, Wood agreed to plant trees and bushes along 2,500 feet of Powell Creek on land he owns just south of Hollymead. Wood says the plantings will extend between 70 and 100 feet on both sides of the creek. The DEQ tells developers what kinds of flora to plant and where. Furthermore, Wood must pay to put the mitigated land in permanent easement, so that any future development there will not disturb the creek.
With the violation, Wood’s company, United Land Corporation, was fined $2,000. But the real cost was paperwork and lost time, says Wood.
To make up for the extra 17 feet of damage, Wood must mitigate another 17 feet of Powell Creek. This change means his company needed to submit a completely new application to the DEQ, which meant Wood’s workers had to stay away from the Hollymead stream sites for 30 to 40 days while the new permit worked its way through the State bureaucracy, says Wood.
Wood declined to estimate how much the delay cost his company. “That 17 feet was pretty expensive, in terms of time and paperwork,” he says. “I wish we had never disturbed it, I can assure you.”
On January 14, the DEQ published a legal notice of the violation in The Daily Progress. According to the notice, the State Water Control Board will accept public comment about the DEQ’s action against United Land up to 30 days after publication of the notice.
Edward Liggett, an enforcement specialist with the DEQ in Harrisonburg, says people usually use the comment period to opine that the penalty is too harsh, or not harsh enough. But the penalty, he says, isn’t so much punitive as it is a “pathway to compliance.” So far, no one has used the public comment period to sound off about the controversial super shopping center project itself.—John Borgmeyer
There’s always next year
No charter for UVA this time around
Head honchos at the Commonwealth’s three top colleges have decided to put on hold their measures to gain autonomy from the State. On the advice of legislators who say this year’s General Assembly session will be crammed with tax and budget issues, the presidents of Virginia Polytechnic Institute, the College of William and Mary and UVA said last week they will wait until next year to try for “charter” status.
“This doesn’t change anything significantly. The University is just slowing down a little,” says UVA representative Carol Wood.
This fall, presidents of the three schools said they were fed up with the State’s dwindling financial support—especially as nearby rivals like University of North Carolina have been beefing up their college budgets. Faced with the nightmarish vision of top students turning (gasp!) Tarheel, the three Virginia colleges sought to decide their own tuition and out-of-state student enrollment levels, and control their own investments. In exchange, they would take less money from the State.
Each school would have to draft its own unique charter for General Assembly consideration, says Senator Creigh Deeds (D-Charlottesville). “It’s a big bite for legislators to consider in one year,” says Deeds. The General Assembly will consider more than 3,000 bills during the current 60-day session, and legislators are already expecting clashes over tax reform and budget cuts.
A draft of the charter bill has been introduced into both the House and Senate, where the Education and Finance committees of both bodies will study it. When this year’s session ends, Wood says UVA’s administration will work with the State to draft the particulars of UVA’s charter.
Wood doubts the Assembly will come through with any last-minute money that would make autonomy unnecessary. “If you look at how much we’ve been cut and the difficulty the State has had, it’s unlikely,” says Wood.
Don’t cry too hard for UVA, though. Between 2002 and 2003 its endowment grew nearly 7 percent to $1.8 billion from $1.69 billion, more than twice the national average increase of 3 percent, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers.—John Borgmeyer
Schooling the City Council
Everybody’s sick of the MCP. Won’t someone think about the children?
The acrimonious debate over the proposed Meadowcreek Parkway, which continues to roil City politics, has made the upcoming May elections for City Council look like a referendum over the controversial road that would go through McIntire Park. Candidates will likely pepper their election bids with words like “easement” and “VDOT.” But what if the jargon of City politics revolved around accreditation and SOLs—the buzzwords of education?
“I would welcome that more than anything,” says Linda Bowen, the chairperson of the Charlottesville School Board, of an alternate reality where public education ruled City politics. “I think it’s wise for [residents] to scrutinize what’s going on with the school system.”
Public schools should be of interest even to City residents who don’t have kids in the system, as about 31 percent of all of the City’s expenditures go to the schools.
Bowen and several other well-positioned observers of City schools agree that the hottest issue for any education debate would be school funding. According to Superintendent Ron Hutchinson, Charlottesville’s school system is facing a “worst case scenario” of being up to $2 million short for next year’s budget. The crunch is largely due to changes at the State level, including shifts in the retirement system and in the way Charlottesville’s comparative wealth is tabulated by the State. In order to make ends meet for a proposed $46 million budget that suggests increasing teacher salaries by 6 percent, Hutchinson has recommended several possible job cuts.
The City currently contributes two thirds of the schools’ funding, and Hutchinson says the Council “continues to be very generous to us.” But with the State not pulling its share of the load, several observers say schools need more help from local government when it comes to working with Richmond.
Bekah Saxon, a teacher at Buford Middle School and president of the Charlottesville Education Association, says her strongest plea for City Council is for them to push the State to send more money to schools. In the current school year, Virginia only kicks in $16 million of the school system’s total revenue.
After budget worries, other likely local education flashpoints cited by insiders include Virginia’s Standards of Learning (SOL) tests, achievement gaps, potential increases in enrollment and the ongoing search for a new superintendent for City schools.
In order for a Virginia school to be fully accredited by the State, 70 percent of its students must pass the SOL tests in all four core subject areas. Currently, four of Charlottesville’s nine public schools, including Charlottesville High School, fall short of full accreditation. Though the failing rating won’t officially kick in for schools until 2007, this year’s seniors will be the first to be denied diplomas if they fail to pass the SOL tests. Del. Mitchell Van Yahres (D- Charlottesville) recently introduced a bill to delay the diploma sanctions, but the bill was voted down on January 26.
The Federal government also has a hand in school achievement testing with the No Child Left Behind Act. The complicated Federal program targets school performance in several areas, with a range of dates for compliance.
“[School] divisions are not going to escape those mandates,” Hutchinson says of the Federal performance goals, adding that if Charlottesville schools did pull out of the Federal program, “it would have a potentially significant financial impact.”
The implications of the performance tests include an achievement gap between students from lower- and higher-income families, and the possibility of parents being able to remove their kids from failing schools. This issue could also intensify debates over the districting of elementary schools.
“I would love to see a discussion of allowing parents to choose elementary schools,” says Aileen Bartels, the co-president of the parent-teacher organization at Burnley-Moran Elementary.—Paul Fain
Scratchy record
A violent past becomes present for UVA student accused of murder
Witnesses on both sides of the verbal sparring that occurred in the minutes before volunteer firefighter Walker Sisk was stabbed to death on November 8 have testified that UVA student Andrew Alston, the accused murderer, did not appear likely to up the ante with any violence.
“I wasn’t concerned about Andrew getting in a fight,” said Jeffrey Cabrera, a member of the group of four young men that included Alston the night of the murder, at the January 15 murder hearing. “Andrew seemed cool.”
Cabrera might have been more concerned about Alston’s violent tendencies if he had been with him on Halloween night in 1998. That evening, Alston assaulted another juvenile in his suburban Philadelphia hometown. He was later charged with criminal conspiracy and aggravated assault, according to Frank Snow, deputy chief juvenile probation officer for Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.
Though officials with the Montgomery County Juvenile Probation Department are now withholding many of the details of the 1998 Alston assault case, Snow told Beth Cohen of The Reporter, a local newspaper, that the assault, “was a Halloween incident and [Alston] stole the kid’s candy, broke the kid’s nose and the kid ended up with a skull fracture.”
Snow confirms that on January 5, 1999, Alston was committed to a six-month stint at a farm-based juvenile detention program in the Philly area where participants are taught conflict management. Though the residential program is designed to last three months, Alston apparently did a double stint.
At Alston’s January 15 hearing in Charlottesville General District Court, his lawyer, Scott Goodman, introduced clarifying evidence that Alston did not, as had been said in a previous hearing, kick the youth on the ground in the 1999 assault.
Alston’s father, Robert A. Alston, attended the January hearing. The senior Alston is an accomplished corporate lawyer and an elected township supervisor in Andrew’s hometown of Lower Gwynedd. The legal team the Alston family has assembled for the alleged murderer’s defense, which will continue with grand jury proceedings beginning on February 17, includes Goodman, a local lawyer, and Barry Boss, a prominent Washington defense attorney. Among Boss’ most noteworthy defenses was when, in 1998, he and another lawyer persuaded the U.S. Attorney’s Office and Department of Justice to drop the Federal death penalty for a notorious D.C. drug kingpin who had been charged with six murders.
During Alston’s January 15 hearing Boss’ persistent examination of witnesses visibly perturbed Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Jon R. Zug, who will handle the case as it moves to the grand jury in February.—Paul Fain