U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-VA) applauded the inclusion of a number of Virginia priorities in the draft of the nation’s annual defense bill that was announced late last night after weeks of talks between House and Senate negotiators. A full summary of the draft FY23 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is available here.

“As the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I’m glad to see an agreement on draft legislation that will help bolster our military readiness, support critical Virginia jobs, tackle the needs of military families, and reinforce our commitment to Ukraine in its fight against authoritarianism. I look forward to considering this legislation in the Senate,” said Sen. Warner.

The proposal supports $857.9 billion in funding for our nation’s defense and includes a number of Warner-championed provisions that would:

• Help provide better housing support for servicemembers and their families. These provisions direct DoD to reevaluate methodologies for calculating the Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH) to better reflect servicemembers’ housing needs and look at barriers to homeownership that are unique to military members. These provisions are based on two Warner-sponsored bills, the BAH Calculation Improvement Act and the Increasing Home Ownership for Servicemembers Act.
• Authorize more than $285 million in funding for 14 military construction projects in Virginia, including in Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Dahlgren, Newport News, Ft. Belvoir, Langley, and at the Pentagon.
• Accelerate the construction of two new Child Development Centers in Hampton Roads to help provide critical child care for infants and children on installations. This provision mirrors a Congressionally Directed Spending request made by Sen. Warner to help address the larger challenges military families face with the supply of available child care.
• Overhaul how the military understands and studies food insecurity among military members. Based on an amendment led in the Senate by Sen. Warner, the provision will improve how the military collects data and analyzes rates of food insecurity among servicemembers and their families to better measure and more effectively address the concerning issue of food insecurity in the military.
• Support the critical work of the U.S. Intelligence Community by including the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023 (IAA). The IAA allocates funding, provides legal authorities, and enhances congressional oversight of the Intelligence Community.
• Bring federal data collection into the 21^st century and boost financial transparency by modernizing data collection by federal financial regulators. This provision is based on Sen. Warner’s Financial Data Transparency Act, which requires these regulators to develop common data formatting standards that promote the usability and organization of financial data they already collect from regulated institutions – rules that will make data easier for the public to use and for agencies to process.

The bill also includes a number of other crucial measures supported by Sen. Warner.

To support investments in our nation’s defense and diplomatic capabilities, this bill would: 

• Support Navy shipbuilding with $32.6 billion in funding for the procurement of 11 battle force ships, including full funding for the Columbia-class submarine program and for the procurement of two Virginia-class submarines. The bill also would reverse plans for the early retirement of 12 vessels in the coming year. 

• Support the critical work of the U.S. State Department by advancing funding and a range of provisions vital to supporting our nation’s diplomatic efforts and the men and women who work tirelessly to advance those around the world.

• Support the work of the U.S. Coast Guard with more than $28 billion in funding.
• Authorize nearly $132 million for defense research activities at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and other Minority Serving Institutions. Last year, Sen. Warner successfully led an effort in the NDAA to better position HBCUs and MSIs to compete for federal research dollars.

For members of the military and their families, this bill would:

• Authorize a 4.6 percent pay raise to servicemembers and Department of Defense (DoD) civilians.

• Take steps to address the suicide and mental health crisis in the military by directing the DoD to undertake more detailed research into mental health and rates of suicide. This provision seeks to better understand the different ramifications across military career fields. It also directs an Inspector General review of efforts by the Navy to prevent and respond to suicides in light of deaths in the Hampton Roads region and elsewhere.

• Make historic reforms to the military justice system’s handling of certain offenses, including sexual assaults. Following years of tireless effort by advocates, this bill would remove commanders from all prosecutorial and judicial functions for various covered offenses. Sen. Warner is a proud sponsor of Sen. Gillibrand’s Military Justice Improvement and Increasing Prevention Act of 2021, which, combined with bipartisan efforts across both Chambers this year, formed the foundation for these reforms.

• Tackle issues with military housing by:

• Extending DoD’s authority to raise the Basic Allowance for Housing for military families living in higher-cost areas of the country.
• Improving oversight over military housing issues and codifying the position of Chief Housing Officer. Sen. Warner has pushed to have a single, designated lead for housing at DoD to improve accountability to residents and Congress and promote and increase coordination.
• Requiring the Secretary of Defense to implement health-related recommendations by the Department’s Inspector General regarding privatized military housing.

• Tackle food insecurity by:

• Expanding eligibility for the Basic Needs Allowance will help ensure that all men and women in uniform and their families have the necessities they need. The Basic Needs Allowance was created through the Warner-sponsored Military Hunger Prevention Act, which aims to combat disturbing rates of food insecurity in the military.
• Creating a pilot program to better address rates of food insecurity among veterans. This provision would offer grant funding to organizations that are actively working to address this challenge.
• Adding $210 million in authorized funding for the military’s commissary system to help support food access for servicemembers and their families.

• Increase access to timely child care for military families who undergo a permanent change of station by creating a pilot program to provide child care-related reimbursement to these families.

For the ongoing effort to support Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s authoritarianism, this bill would: 

• Extend the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) – one of the main tools used by the U.S. in support of Ukraine’s defensive needs – and authorize $800 million for this program in the coming fiscal year.
• Authorize more than $6 billion to fully fund the European Deterrence Initiative.
• Hold Russia accountable for its atrocities by stating that the United States will collect, analyze, and preserve evidence related to Russian war crimes and will assist in pursuing appropriate accountability for those responsible.

• Increase transparency and accountability by taking steps to ensure that Inspectors General are able to adequately conduct oversight of U.S. funding to ensure it is most effectively being applied in support of Ukraine’s efforts.
• Express the full commitment of the United States to NATO and to continuing Ukrainian assistance during Russia’s violent and illegal invasion.
• Authorize more than $2.7 billion for munitions production capacity, and direct a long-term assessment of our defense industrial base’s capacity.

To bolster our ability to compete in the 21^st century, this bill would:

• Continue to strengthen U.S.-India relations by directing the Departments of Defense and State to pursue greater engagement and expanded cooperation with India related to emerging technology, joint R&D, defense and cyber capabilities, and other opportunities for collaboration – including for reducing India’s reliance on Russian-built defense equipment. These provisions support an effort by Sen. Warner, co-Chair of the Senate India Caucus, to highlight the importance of our defense partnership with India, and to support accelerated efforts by India to diversify defense systems.

• Better invest in emerging technologies by boosting funding for basic and applied research and development of advanced tech by $2.85 billion.

• Support the commercialization of critical capabilities by authorizing $300 million in funding for new bio-manufacturing facilities.
• Authorize an increase of $120 million for 5G technology R&D and transition support. 

• Authorize an increase of $75 million for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as it looks to implement recommendations put forward by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (AI). It would also authorize an increase of $50 million for AI at U.S. Cyber Command and require more strategic, longer-term planning related to DoD’s efforts to rapidly adopt AI to relevant cyber missions.
• Support DARPA’s quantum computing activities with an increase of $20 million.
• Increase productivity and cooperation in microelectronics by establishing a working group of government, private sector, and academia experts to better enable coordination and consultation related to R&D and manufacturing.

Share the News:

WASHINGTON – Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Maryland, hopes to reform medical debt practices by introducing legislation that would curb unfair policies and protect consumers.
Van Hollen and co-sponsor Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Connecticut, announced the bill on Nov. 30.

The Maryland lawmaker and Murphy first sponsored the legislation in 2020. The bill called the Strengthening Consumer Protections and Medical Debt Transparency Act failed to pass before the end of 2020.

“When folks are sick or in the hospital, the last thing they should be worried about is whether they’ll lose their house or their wages for seeking care,” Van Hollen said in a statement. “This legislation puts safeguards in place to ensure transparency, cap interest rates, and keep the focus on patient’s health and wellbeing so they can get the care they need.”

If passed, the measure would require healthcare institutions to communicate about debt with consumers and cap the annual interest rate growth for the medical debt at 5%.

The legislation also calls on the Department of Health and Human Services to create a database for public information about medical debt collection practices from hospitals and other providers.

Additionally, the bill includes consumer protections like checking for insurance coverage assistance before a provider sends the debt to collection agencies and that healthcare entities must provide patients with itemized bills and payment receipts.

“Forcing people to go bankrupt just because they get sick is immoral — plain and simple,” Murphy said in a statement. “We need to shed light on the hospitals out there who are abusing patients with overly aggressive debt collection practices.”

In 2021, 12% of Maryland residents had medical debts in collection, according to a study by the Urban Institute.

A 2020 Gonzales poll by Economic Action Maryland showed that 34% of Marylanders would not be able to pay an unexpected $500 medical bill.

Medical debt also disproportionately affects Black people. In Maryland, 24% of Black residents said they delayed seeking medical care because of costs compared to 12% of white people.

“Unlike many other debts, no one chooses to get sick,” said Marceline White, director of Economic Action Maryland, an organization that has helped pass legislation targeting unfair medical debt practices.

“You can’t cost-comparison shop when you’re in an ambulance on the way to a hospital,” she said. “So many families simply don’t have the resources to absorb that kind of unexpected financial blow, which can be catastrophic.”

White said the new bill by Van Hollen and Murphy is a positive step for the country and targets the “most egregious” medical debt practices.

She stressed the importance of reform with the backdrop of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and said there has been broad support in Maryland for this type of legislation.

“I think we are going to see continued strains on our health care system and on many families who are having chronic illnesses sort of post-pandemic post-COVID,” White said. “I think this should be something that most Americans and most members of Congress can agree upon. At least, I would certainly hope so.”

RIP Medical Debt is a charity established to reduce the burden of medical debt on low-income families using donations, paying off over $7 billion of debt since 2014 for over 4 million people. CEO and president of RIP Medical Debt, Allison Sesso, is enthusiastic about federal attention to the topic.

“We must do more to protect patients from medical debt and ensure people get the health care they need without fear of incurring debt,” Sesso said in a statement to Capital News Service. “(The bill) takes positive steps toward addressing the data challenges we face in understanding the prevalence of medical debt so we can better target policy solutions and more closely monitor the use of extraordinary collection actions.”

By GRACE YARROW
Capital News Service

Share the News:

The State Capitol. (Ned Oliver/ Virginia Mercury)

• Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder gave congressional testimony that was “often evasive or misleading,” according to a report from the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform, which has been looking into a variety of misconduct allegations surrounding the team.—Washington Post

• William Fowler, a former sergeant with the Virginia Beach Sheriff’s Office who is married to Democratic Del. Kelly Convirs-Fowler, has filed a lawsuit claiming he was fired over politics. Sheriff Ken Stolle called the claims “completely frivolous.”—Virginian-Pilot

• Arlington County is helping lead a push for stronger Virginia laws against “swatting,” the practice of calling in fake threats to draw a police response to a targeted location.—ARLNow

• An Albemarle County judge set a March 30 preliminary hearing in the case of Christopher Darnell Jones Jr., the University of Virginia student facing murder charges for allegedly killing three football players in a shooting last month.—VPM

• The owner of a Spotsylvania County restaurant that’s feuded with authorities over COVID-19 rules rejected Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s proposal to forgive all punishments for businesses like his. “You have proven how ineffective and weak you are as a leader,” wrote owner Matt Strickland, who’s also a Republican candidate for state Senate.—Free Lance-Star

Share the News:

Virgie Mae Thompson, 95, of Front Royal, Virginia, passed away on Thursday, December 8, 2022, at Winchester Medical Center.

A funeral service will be held on Thursday, December 15, 2022, at 2:00 pm at Maddox Funeral Home, 105 West Main Street, Front Royal, with Sammy Campbell officiating. Burial will follow at Prospect Hill Cemetery.

Mrs. Thompson was born on July 4, 1927, in Rappahannock County, Virginia, to the late Charles and Minnie Pomeroy Thompson. She was also preceded in death by her three sons, Charles Thompson, Ronald Lee Thompson, and Jerry Wayne Thompson; two daughters, Tammy Sue Henry and Dora Lynn Sturdivant and eight siblings.

Survivors include her son, Gary Allen Thompson (Faye); daughter, Ella Marie Thompson (John); son-in-law, Donald Henry; twelve grandchildren; eight great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren.

The family will receive friends one hour before the service at the funeral home.

Share the News:

Another data glitch in Virginia’s election system caused 10,558 felons to remain on the voter rolls after they committed new crimes that should’ve made them ineligible to vote, state officials announced Friday.

The Virginia Department of Elections said it discovered the issue while conducting list maintenance as the agency prepares to replace the state’s aging voter system.

The affected voter registrations involve people with felony convictions who had their rights restored by governors as Virginia dramatically relaxed its lifetime disenfranchisement policy over the last decade. As hundreds of thousands of felons regained their right to vote, the state’s voter system wasn’t set up to account for the possibility that some of those newly registered voters might re-offend and become ineligible again.

“The original computer code written for the restoration of rights process did not provide for the instance in which an individual might be reconvicted of a felony following the restoration of their rights,” the agency release said. “ELECT has automated a solution to cancel these voters and add them back to the prohibited list.”

According to officials, only a small portion of the impacted voters — roughly 1,000 — have cast a ballot in a Virginia election since 2011. That indicates the impact on election outcomes was likely minimal because the vast majority of people who had their rights restored did not re-offend.

Governors from both parties have prioritized rights restoration over the last decade, meaning a felony conviction no longer prohibits democratic participation for life as it once did. However, the lifetime felon disenfranchisement policy remains in the Virginia Constitution, despite the repeal efforts of advocates who argue fundamental rights shouldn’t come down to the whims of whatever governor happens to be in office. Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe made rights restoration a major focus of his administration, restoring the rights of more than 150,000 people during his time in office.

The felon issue comes after the elections department experienced significant problems earlier this year processing voter registration data coming over from the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles. Before the midterm elections, local election officials had to process more than 250,000 transactions that hadn’t properly transferred. Officials said that issue was also caused by faulty computer code.

The new voter system, which officials have said is expected to address many technological defects in the current one, is set to be developed and implemented over the next two years.

by Graham Moomaw, Virginia Mercury

Virginia Mercury is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sarah Vogelsong for questions: info@virginiamercury.com. Follow Virginia Mercury on Facebook and Twitter.

Share the News:

Actually, Virginia has several data center problems.

One seems like a good problem to have, at least if you are a locality looking to attract business.

Data centers pay a lot of local taxes while requiring little in the way of local services, and the steady buildout has supported thousands of construction jobs across the region. Indeed, so many data center companies have chosen to locate in Northern Virginia that we now host the largest concentration of data centers worldwide. No wonder other regions of the commonwealth are angling to bring data centers to their neck of the woods too.

But there’s more to being the data center capital of the world than just raking in cash. To drive through Data Center Alley is to witness suburban sprawl on steroids, with its attendant deforestation, farmland loss, and wildlife habitat. The environmental destruction doesn’t stop at a facility’s property line; a single building covers acres of land, causing massive rainwater runoff problems that can impact streams and drinking water resources miles downstream.

Other problems are unique to the industry. Cooling the servers requires a single data center to consume as much water as a city of 30,000-50,000 people, and giant fans make the surrounding area noisy day and night. The average data center has so many backup diesel generators onsite that it requires a major air source permit from the Department of Environmental Quality. The generators must be started regularly to ensure they will work in an outage. Multiply those startups by the total number of data centers in Northern Virginia, resulting in poorer air quality across the region.

Moreover, data centers require astonishing amounts of energy to power their operations and cool their servers. The industry uses over 12% of Dominion Energy Virginia’s total electricity supply, more than any other business category. Electric cooperatives supply more. Industry sources put Virginia’s total data center load at 1,688 megawatts as of 2021 — equivalent to about 1.6 million homes. Feeding ever more of these energy hogs requires utilities to build new electric generation and transmission lines, with costs and impacts borne by all ratepayers.

Many data center operators have pledged to run their operations on renewable energy, but only a few major tech companies have followed through on building solar facilities in Virginia. Indeed, their energy appetite is so great that if all Virginia data centers ran only on solar energy with battery backup, meeting their current demand would require all the solar currently installed in Virginia, Maryland, DC, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Delaware put together. (For you energy nerds, I’m assuming a 25% capacity factor for solar; meeting 1,688 megawatts of data center load would take 6,752 megawatts of solar.)

That’s not a reason to send data centers elsewhere—unless we’re talking about data centers that host cryptocurrency mining (and yes, they exist in Virginia, with more on the way). Those data centers we should certainly send elsewhere, preferably to Mars, unless scientists find life there, and in that case, to the nearest black hole in outer space. As for the others, we’d just like them to be part of the climate solution rather than adding to our carbon footprint.

Why are data centers so keen to locate in Northern Virginia? Historically the draws were the fiber-optic network in Northern Virginia, proximity to Washington, D.C., relatively low-cost energy, and a concerted early effort on the part of Loudoun County to make locating here as easy as possible.

Then there are the state subsidies. Since 2010, Virginia has offered tax incentives to data centers that located in the Commonwealth. Virginia’s largest economic development incentive is the data center sales and use tax exemption. It’s also an increasingly expensive one, rising from $30 million in outlays in 2010 to $138 million in 2020. A state audit showed Virginia taxpayers had provided over $830 million to data center operators through 2020; the total is certainly over $1 billion by now.

A 2019 Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission report found that Virginia received back only 72 cents for every dollar of the data center tax incentive while creating very few jobs. That money-losing proposition was judged “moderately successful.”

Thus far, opposition to data centers has tended to be local and focused mainly on land use issues. Preservationists have been at the forefront of opposition to Prince William County’s proposed Digital Gateway, a data center development across more than 2,100 acres in an area known as the “Rural Crescent.” The development would abut parkland and Manassas National Battlefield, leading opponents to call this a new Battle of Manassas. Citizens have sued the board of county supervisors for approving an amendment to the county’s comprehensive plan that allows the data center expansion.

Prince William could steal Loudoun’s title of Data Center Alley. But land use battles are raging.

The battle has spilled across the border into Fairfax County, whose leaders worry that stormwater runoff from the development will pollute the county’s main drinking water source, the Occoquan Reservoir.

The divide on data center siting is polarizing, but it isn’t partisan. The Democratic majority on the Prince William board of supervisors approved the Gateway project over opposition from Republican Supervisor Yesli Vega and state Del. Danica Roem, a Democrat. In a scathing op-ed, Roem argues that there’s no such thing as a green data center.

Since data centers provide essential services and have to locate somewhere, the answer isn’t to ban them from the state (crypto-mining operations excepted!). A better approach would be for Virginia to guide development away from overburdened areas to parts of the state that are desperate for new businesses and to link tax incentives to energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy and reclaimed water.

Currently, Virginia is operating on auto-pilot, paying more tax incentives and fueling conflict, sprawl, and carbon emissions. That needs to change.

Share the News: