Downtown
Virginia lawmakers unsuccessful at ‘decoupling’ from California Clean Car law
Virginia lawmakers this week shot down the last bill of seven introduced to reverse the adopted California standard on electric vehicles Tuesday afternoon.
By Adrianna Lawrence
Virginia lawmakers this week shot down the last bill of seven introduced to reverse the adopted California standard on electric vehicles Tuesday afternoon. A California LLC may need to comply with the California Clean Car law if it operates a fleet of vehicles, such as a delivery or transportation business.
Del. Tony Wilt, R-Rockingham, proposed House Bill 1378 to repeal the 2021 law allowing the Virginia State Air Pollution Control Board to implement emission standards for vehicles with a 2025 or later model year.
The current Clean Car law, adopted from California and soon to be implemented in Virginia, states 35% of all new cars and trucks sold in Virginia with a 2025 model year must be electric. By 2035, 100% of new models on the market must be electric, according to California’s final regulation order.
Wilt introduced the bill for several reasons, he said. He questioned whether Virginia’s infrastructure can withstand 100% electrical powered cars in 12 years, Wilt said.
“In such a short period of time, we start putting these demands on electric grids of having the capabilities to keep up with electric generation,” Wilt said.
The bill passed in the House with a party-line vote of 52-48.
Ahead of the final House vote, Wilt expressed concern over the cost of electric vehicles and said “they still cost significantly more upfront.”
“Which can make them unattainable,” Wilt said.
Wilt’s bill died in the Senate Agriculture, Conservation and Natural Resources committee on a party-line 8-7 vote to pass by indefinitely. Other similar measures introduced in the Senate were incorporated into one bill that met the same outcome in the same committee.
Virginia residents will look to surrounding states to buy combustion engine vehicles because of the decrease of those available cars and the expensive costs of electric vehicles, according to Wilt.
“And so we’re actually taking the revenues out of the state of Virginia,” Wilt said.
Wilt believes in a renewable energy future but said it should be done incrementally.
“Instead of these heavy-handed governmental mandates to meet these deadlines and so forth, let the free market dictate that,” Wilt said.
Natural consumer demand for electric vehicles is what should drive the market to go green, according to Wilt.
Virginia needs to “decouple” from California and establish standards unique to Virginia, according to Wilt and other Republicans who have spoken against the measure.
Trip Pollard, senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, said it is not legally possible to create a Virginia-specific standard.
States either accept the required Clean Air Act federal regulation or choose the more protective standard introduced by California.
“The General Assembly decided in ’21 that we want to choose the more protective option,” Pollard said. “We can’t set our own standards.”
The reasoning behind this is simple, Pollard said: Car manufacturers cannot meet 50 different state regulations.
“The manufacturers got that written into the Clean Air Act decades ago because they don’t want to have to produce 50 different models of vehicles for different states,” Pollard said.
California sought a waiver from the EPA to create its own standards, which now allows states to also choose California’s stricter standards.
So far, 17 other states have adopted California’s clean car standards, according to the California Air Resources Board.
Many advocates for the Clean Car law, including Pollard, point out these next few years in the General Assembly are crucial for prepping the state’s infrastructure for electric cars.
Along with legislative action, Virginia has already begun receiving incremental funding that will be over $100 million through the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure, according to Pollard. Private companies, such as Tesla, are distributing electric car chargers as well, he said.
Even with these initiatives, some legislators are already giving up on the law before it has even taken effect, according to Pollard.
“To me it makes no sense to repeal these standards now, when they offer such enormous health and environmental benefits,” Pollard said.
Lawmakers can ditch the adopted California standard and go back to the less protective federal one if the Clean Car law does not work out, according to Pollard.
Environmental organizations, like the Virginia League of Conservation Voters, strongly believe in keeping the Clean Car law in place due to the harm combustion engine vehicles bring to Virginia’s air quality.
“Transportation emissions are Virginia’s largest driver of climate change,” said VLCV deputy director Lee Francis. “They make up about half of our total carbon pollution.”
Electric vehicles are popular right now and there is a fast growing shift toward electric vehicles, according to Francis.
“A lot of it is driven by the auto manufacturers themselves,” Francis said.
General Motors, Ford, BMW and Honda are just some of the car manufacturers shifting toward zero emission vehicles, according to Forbes.
Lawmakers, lobbyists and Gov. Glenn Youngkin have attempted to repeal the Clean Car law since 2021. Citizens question what the state’s future of electric vehicles will look like by 2026.
The effort to overturn the Clean Car law could be a factor in the upcoming November election, according to Stephen Farnsworth, director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies at the University of Mary Washington and a political science professor.
All seats are up for reelection in the currently Republican-majority House and the Democratic-majority Senate.
Candidates will compete for Senate and House seats in new districts recently redrawn to keep up with population changes. The redistricting could favor Democrats more since the population changes across Virginia put more districts in Democratic-leaning areas, Farnsworth said.
House Republicans will use the Clean Car law as a part of their campaign to be reelected, he said.
“Republicans often run on issues of individual freedoms and a bill that comes out of California and shapes public preferences in a liberal direction is a useful thing for Republican candidates to talk about,” Farnsworth said.
The Air Pollution Control Board will implement the standard shortly after Jan. 1, 2024 and auto manufacturers will have to abide by it to sell their vehicles in Virginia, according to the board’s vehicle standards.
Downtown
Feds identify ‘significant’ ongoing concerns with Virginia special education
After failing to meet federal requirements to support students with disabilities in 2020, the Virginia Department of Education will remain under further review by the federal government after continuing to fall short in monitoring and responding to complaints against school districts, according to a letter from the U.S. Department of Education.
By Nathaniel Cline
After failing to meet federal requirements to support students with disabilities in 2020, the Virginia Department of Education will remain under further review by the federal government after continuing to fall short in monitoring and responding to complaints against school districts, according to a letter from the U.S. Department of Education.
“We have significant new or continued areas of concerns with the State’s implementation of general supervision, dispute resolution, and confidentiality requirements” of IDEA, stated the Feb. 17 letter from the Office of Special Education Programs.
The U.S. Department of Education first flagged its concerns in a June 2020 “Differentiated Monitoring and Support Report” on how Virginia was complying with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, following a 2019 visit by the Office of Special Education Programs.
IDEA, passed in 1975, requires all students with disabilities to receive a “free appropriate public education.”
The Virginia Department of Education disputed some of the federal government’s findings in a June 19, 2020 letter.
Samantha Hollins, assistant superintendent of special education and student services, wrote that verbal complaints “are addressed via technical assistance phone calls to school divisions” and staff members “regularly work to resolve parent concerns” by providing “guidance documentation” and acting as intermediaries between school employees and parents.
However, some parents and advocates say systemic problems in how the state supports families of children with disabilities persist. At the same time, a June 15, 2022 state report found one of Virginia’s most critical teacher shortage areas is in special education.
“Appropriate policies and procedures for both oversight and compliance, and their implementation, are crucial to ensuring that children with disabilities and their families are afforded their rights under IDEA and that a free appropriate public education (FAPE) is provided,” said the Feb. 17 letter from the Office of Special Education Programs.
While the U.S. Department of Education wrote that it believes the Virginia Department of Education has resolved some of the problems identified in 2020, including resolving complaints filed by parents and creating a mediation plan, it said it has identified “new and continued areas of concern” and intends to continue monitoring Virginia’s provision of services for students with disabilities.
Among those are ongoing concerns over the state’s complaint and due process systems that “go beyond the originally identified concerns” originally found. The Office of Special Education Programs writes it has concluded Virginia “does not have procedures and practices that are reasonably designed to ensure a timely resolution process” for due process complaints.
The department also said it has concerns over the practices of at least five school districts that are inconsistent with IDEA’s regulations.
The decision comes after the U.S. Department of Education announced in November that Fairfax County Public Schools, Virginia’s largest school district, failed to provide thousands of students with disabilities with the educational services they were entitled to during remote learning at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Virginia is also facing a federal class-action lawsuit over claims that its Department of Education and Fairfax County Public Schools violated the rights of disabled students under IDEA.
Parents involved in the case said the Virginia Department of Education and Fairfax school board “have actively cultivated an unfair and biased” hearing system to oversee challenges to local decisions about disabled students, according to the suit.
Charles Pyle, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Education, said in an email that “VDOE continues to work with our federal partners to ensure Virginia’s compliance with all federal requirements, as we have since the ‘Differentiated Monitoring and Support Report’ was issued in June 2020.”
The federal government said if Virginia could not demonstrate full compliance with IDEA requirements, it could impose conditions on grant funds the state receives to support early intervention and special education services for children with disabilities and their families.
Last year, Virginia received almost $13.5 billion in various grants linked to IDEA, according to a July 1, 2022 letter to former Superintendent of Public Instruction Jillian Balow, who resigned on March 9.
James Fedderman, president of the Virginia Education Association, blasted Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration after the findings were released.
“While the Youngkin administration has been busy waging culture wars in schools, his administration has failed to meet basic compliance requirements with the U.S. Department of Education for students with disabilities,” Fedderman said. “This failure threatens our federal funding for students with disabilities and is a disservice to Virginia families who need critical special needs support.”
Downtown
Richmond 911 callers can soon provide feedback on calls for service via text message
Beginning March 20, those who call 911 with some types of non-life-threatening emergencies will receive a text message within hours or a day after the call with a short survey about the service they received on the call.
Some 911 callers in Richmond will begin to receive follow-up text messages next week asking for their ranking of the service they received and additional information.
Beginning March 20, those who call 911 with some types of non-life-threatening emergencies will receive a text message within hours or a day after the call with a short survey about the service they received on the call.
The Richmond Department of Emergency Communications, Preparedness and Response is using the feedback from callers as another way to ensure that it is continuing to deliver excellent emergency services to Richmond.
“It is very important that those who receive the text message answer the questions as accurately as possible, based on the service they received on the call, not on the response from first responders with different agencies,” said Director Stephen Willoughby. “We use the feedback that callers provide to monitor and improve our 911 services to Richmond residents and visitors, as well as the other measurements of service that we have in place.”
Those who would like to offer feedback, but do not receive a text message, are encouraged to email [email protected] or call 804-646-5911. More information about offering commendations or filing a complaint is on the department’s website athttps://www.rva.gov/911/comments. In addition, the department conducts a full survey of adults who live, work and study in Richmond every two years. More information about those surveys and results are at https://www.rva.gov/911/community-outreach.
The Department of Emergency Communications, Preparedness and Response is using a third-party vendor, PowerEngage, to send the text-message surveys and report the results. Text messages may be sent for other uses in the future.
More information about the text-message surveys, from the news release:
- The answers that callers provide in the text message have no effect on the service provided to that caller.
- Callers who do not want to participate in the text-message survey would simply not respond to the text message. They also may reply STOP to opt out of future text surveys from DECPR.
- Callers should not use the surveys to report any other emergency or request help. They would need to call or text 911 for immediate help. To file a police report or request nonemergency public safety help, call 804-646-5100. For other city services, call 311, visit rva311.com or use the RVA311 app.
- Those who have further questions or would like to request a call-back from a staff member about the survey or their experiences, may email [email protected].
- More information about the after-call survey is at https://www.rva.gov/911/survey.
Students in 9th-11th grade can apply to join the next cohort of this summer’s Atlas Artist Residency—an 8-week art intensive giving teens the opportunity to develop artistic skills while working alongside professional artists in a creative and collaborative environment. 10 teens will be selected to participate and awarded personal art-studio space, a program stipend of $1350, materials, and the opportunity to expand their portfolio of work and bolster their resume for college applications.
Applications are open through March 16, 2023.
Head to https://www.art180.org/student-artist-residency for the details and to submit your application!
University of Richmond announces new provost
Henrico HS principal honored with REB Leadership Award; Colonial Trail ES principal is runner-up
Photo of the Day: Sunset Road
City hosting public meeting on replacement of Byrd Park Reservoir roof
Photo of the Day: Kaleidoscope
Gardeners Wanted to Help in Forest Hill Park
Husband-and-wife duo bringing new restaurant concept to former Mill on MacArthur space
New full-service commercial kitchen, fast casual food hall opens Wednesday
Richmond Falcon Cam is Back
