During the 2024 General Assembly session, I focused my legislative efforts on education, school safety, housing, and energy. Proposed legislation for 2025 is available on the Legislative Information System (LIS). Here is a quick overview of a few of my bills.
Last year, I carried three pieces of legislation, two of which passed, to bring housing prices down by bringing housing supply up. My three bills focused on single-stair case reform; cutting the red-tape for plats approval; and increasing the supply of housing near jobs by building residential in commercially zoned areas.
This year, I am back with four proposals, which you can read about in my op-ed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, to continue tackling the housing shortage.
My first bill, Senate Bill 975, will create housing targets for localities, requiring localities to show an average of a 1.5% growth in their housing stock every year for five years. Localities will have complete control over how they achieve this growth, and they will not be penalized as long as they make a good faith effort to meet the goal and increase their housing stock.
My second bill, Senate Bill 839 otherwise known as “Housing Near Jobs” will create by-right residential in commercial zoned areas to facilitate construction of mix-used communities–think of the popular Libbie Mill and West Broad Village. This bill will advance much-needed efforts to convert strip malls and other commercial areas to mixed-use developments that bring working people closer to their jobs.
My third bill, Senate Bill 974 continues with plat reform. Too often developments are bogged down in time-consuming bureaucratic processes that delay (often by years) the start of the project. SB 974 will streamline and shorten the approval process by funneling plats proposals through an administrative planning commission. This will shorten the plats review time by eliminating the locality review requirement, expediting housing development projects.
Finally, I’ll be introducing a bill to ban out-of-state corporations from buying up our existing housing stock and, just as importantly, require them to unwind their housing portfolio in Virginia. Nothing is a bigger drain on a family’s budget than housing. With housing prices skyrocketing across the Richmond region, working-class people should not be priced out of living in the communities they serve.
As a career educator, I will continue to prioritize policies that improve our public education system for teachers and students alike. For years, I have been working to overhaul our existing standardized assessments for students in kindergarten through high school so they better assess their abilities and understanding of the subject.
In 2022, I passed House Bill 585 which convened a work group to make recommendations to the Secretary of Education and the Superintendent of Public Instruction to revise SOL assessments.
This year, I am introducing Senate Bill 855, which builds off of those recommendations and works towards implementing more rigorous performance-based tests that will assess students’ abilities to apply knowledge and skills in ways that the current SOL tests do not.
I will also be introducing two other education bills, one designed to ensure that teacher training time is well spent, Senate Bill 822 and another, Senate Bill 955, that ensures school districts with fewer resources have access to high quality instructional materials.
I am also preparing resolutions to celebrate notable achievements of residents of the 16th District and memorial resolutions honoring members of our community that we lost this year. If you would like to recommend a member of our community to be honored by a resolution, please email me at [email protected].
