Delegate Phillip Scott: Weekly Newsletter XCVII

As this was the last full week bills could be heard on the House  side before they cross over to the Senate. That means I had a LOT of bills come up this week and many that I expected to be reasonable legislation, unfortunately were not passed.    I do not care who gets the credit, so long as good policy goes through, but it feels like political games are being played on the other side of the aisle to ensure there are no big wins for Republicans this year. This is a strategy that is deceptive and manipulative to the public.    HB422 technically lives and will be passed. This ensures my car tax bill from two years ago, which saved Virginians hundreds of millions of dollars by allowing localities the mechanism to individually lower their car taxes to account for inflation, got rolled into HB1502. The Democrats wanted the credit for a good bill. The credit is not what bothers me, it is the deceptiveness. Nonetheless, I am glad that HB422 will be law very soon.

Bill Highlights

HB1220 went through committee unanimously this week and is onto the house floor! This is a bill which I received from a constituent who noticed that his home insurance went up more than he thought. Under current regulations, your personal property is valued at 50% of the value of your home. This means that if your house, which was worth $200k a few years ago, and is now worth $400k, even if you did not change anything inside your home, you would be forced to insure your property at $200k. The value of your home went up, but the value of your couch did not. This bill allows you to request a lowering of that value to 25% of the home's value. I am glad that democrats see the damage that inflation caused and are willing to do small things to fix it.    I also had a bill to ban discriminatory abortions on the basis of race and sex. Abortion is not a valid form of birth control, and I am tired of it being marketed as healthcare, it is not. I made that point in committee, but to no avail. A baby girl is just as valuable as a baby boy and vice versa. I hope that the law will recognize this in the future.    I had a bill to put a statute of limitations on the initiation of debt collection at 7 years. This bill got continued to 2025 because the committee was not convinced that 7 years was the right number. I will be bringing back HB1220 next year and will hopefully pass.