Lori Cockrell was getting ready for bed last Thursday night when her phone rang. It was her state legislator — Del. Delores Oates, R-Warren County — who was calling the mayor of Front Royal with some bad news. What should have been a routine bill dealing with the town’s industrial development authority, a bill that had passed the House of Delegates unanimously, had unexpectedly been killed in the state Senate. The reason the bill was killed had nothing to do with its content, but seemingly everything with where it had appeared on the Senate calendar. The Front Royal IDA bill had come up immediately after a partisan vote that did not go the way that a Democratic senator from the other side of the state liked, so that senator led the charge to kill the next Republican bill that came up. The Front Royal bill just happened to be the one. Oates suggested that Cockrell watch the video of the Senate debate that led to the bill’s demise (the debate starts at about the 1-hour mark). She did. “I was just dumbfounded,” Cockrell said. “It’s an innocuous bill,” but one that was important to Front Royal and Warren County. Without that bill, a rural county in the Shenandoah Valley where the median household income is lower than the state average will not have a way to issue bonds or loans to attract employers. Here’s what happened. “My town has suffered ridiculous things over the past 50 years,” Oates said. Let’s begin with the one of those things that has a connection to Roanoke. For much of the first half of the 1900s, Roanoke had two main employers: the Norfolk & Western Railway and the American Viscose rayon plant. The American Viscose plant closed in 1958, one in a series of economic traumas that rocked Roanoke at the time and changed its economic trajectory. That plant’s industrial remains are now being redeveloped into a multiuse project known as Riverdale. All that’s a famous story in Roanoke; what’s less well-known is that the Roanoke facility’s sister plant in Front Royal continued in operation. The name changed — to Avtex — but the work went on. While the Viscose site in Roanoke looked bad for decades, it generally avoided environmental problems; the most serious ones are outside the property of the current Riverdale development and relate to more recent activity, not the old Viscose operation. Meanwhile, the Viscose-turned-Avtex site in Front Royal was at one point cited for more than 2,000 environmental violations within a five-year span. When the plant finally closed in 1989, the shutdown left the town with 1,300 people out of work and, as The Washington Post reported , “440 acres full of toxic waste.” The county’s unemployment rate spiked to 15.4%. For a time, the old Avtex property became the largest Superfund site in Virginia. Replacing those jobs became a priority for the Front Royal-Warren County Economic Development Authority. Then in 2019, scandal hit, although scandal might be too weak a word. “The scandal, tragedy, a million things you could call it — the outright thievery with the Warren County EDA,” Cockrell said Tuesday. “The largest embezzlement in the history of Virginia,” Oates said. “It was a Bernie Madoff sort of thing — it was that large a scandal,” Cockrell said. More than $21 million went missing. The former executive director is now in federal prison, serving a 14-year sentence after being found guilty of 34 counts of wire and bank fraud, money laundering and aggravated identity theft. The sheriff, who was implicated in the scheme, killed himself. All five county supervisors were indicted, although those charges were later dismissed. That Front Royal-Warren County Economic Development Authority, which was set up to promote economic development, is in limbo. The Winchester Star reports the EDA is “now more than $20 million in the red, has been rendered insolvent and likely unable to pay off its debt.” With that EDA embroiled in legal action, the town and the county still needed a way to pursue economic development. They just didn’t want to use an EDA that had been tainted by scandal. Local officials wanted a brand-new entity to start with a clean slate. However, that EDA can’t be shut down because state law says an EDA can’t disband if it owes money, and Cockrell says state law also prohibits having two similar authorities in the same place. To get around those obstacles, then-Del. Chris Collins, R-Frederick County, introduced a bill in 2020 to create a separate industrial development authority for the town of Front Royal and give it power to include Warren County if it wanted to. That bill passed the General Assembly unanimously and was signed into law. “It basically opened the door so we could recruit [industries] and move forward,” Cockrell said. That bill also included a sunset clause of July 1, 2025. This year Oates introduced a bill to extend that for another five years. All this is very routine in Richmond. Her bill, HB 1842, passed the House of Delegates unanimously. Last Thursday, it came before the state Senate and likely would have passed unanimously there as well, except for one thing: a dispute over how members of the Virginia Beach City Council should be elected. Like many things, that, too, is complicated. Virginia Beach used to elect seven members by districts, three at large, plus an at-large mayor. A federal court ruled in 2021 that diluted minority voting strength and ordered a system of 10 districts and an at-large mayor. That’s what Virginia Beach has today. However, the city’s charter has not been changed, and efforts to revise it to reflect the court’s ruling have been controversial. Last week, a bill to redo the Virginia Beach charter came before the state Senate. It split the Senate along partisan lines, with 21 Democrats voting yes, 19 Republicans voting no. However, charter changes require a supermajority of 27 votes. The bill failed. The next bill up was Oates’ Front Royal bill. Unexpectedly, every Democrat voted it down. Seeing that this was happening, state Sen. Mark Obenshain, R-Rockingham County, also voted “no,” so that he could use a parliamentary maneuver to bring the bill back up and force a debate. When Obenshain finished, state Sen. Aaron Rouse, D-Virginia Beach, rose “to speak to the bill.” Except he didn’t. He spoke about the defeated Virginia Beach bill, explaining again why the Senate should have passed it, citing a survey that showed 81% of those in Virginia Beach support the charter change. Obenshain asked Rouse what his objection was to the Front Royal bill. Rouse answered: “I [will explain] why we had the votes on this side of the aisle for why this bill was not successful when the senator from Rockingham explains to the people of Virginia Beach and this body why they would ignore the will of 81% of the people of Virginia Beach.” Translation: This was a partisan matter and Democrats had the votes to send Republicans a message. So they did. This isn’t the first time a local and technical bill has gotten caught up in partisan fighting. Earlier this session, Del. Israel O’Quinn, R-Washington County, put forth a bill that would have given Bristol the power to deal with a blighted property — the former Virginia Intermont College campus, part of which was recently destroyed by fire. That bill, which had passed a House subcommittee unanimously, was inexplicably killed in the full committee when five Democrats who had previously voted for it switched their votes and joined all the other Democrats in killing the bill. The committee did not even give O’Quinn, who was next door at another meeting, the courtesy of alerting him so he could address whatever unspoken concerns the members had. None of those members who switched their votes responded to an inquiry by Cardinal News about why they changed their votes. Eventually, a similar bill, by Sen. Todd Pillion, R-Washington County, passed that same House committee unanimously and is now headed to the governor for his signature. Whatever happened in the House committee originally happened in the dark, but things worked out for Bristol in the end. Front Royal and Warren County aren’t so lucky. With Oates’ bill killed, the Front Royal IDA’s authority to work with Warren County will expire, effectively leaving the rest of Warren County with no functioning industrial development authority — all because of a partisan fight over something on the other side of the state. Cockrell said that after Oates’ phone call, she watched the video of the Senate debate multiple times, then sent it out to her fellow council members. She’s watched it several times since, still trying to comprehend what happened. “This really hampers our ability” to recruit new businesses, she said. “I cannot get around the fact of our bill being related to the bill prior to that, the Virginia Beach bill. They’re not related in any way. It’s just somebody holding a political hostage. It feels personal.” Rouse, who is seeking his party’s nomination for lieutenant governor, did not respond to a request to talk about the bill.
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