A chat with lieutenant governor candidate Jody Wagner (Midlothian Exchange)

By Melody Kinser

After having served in two administrations, Jody Wagner decided it was time she became a candidate, targeting the office of lieutenant governor.

A Democrat, she is challenging incumbent Republican Bill Bolling in the Nov. 3 general election.

Wagner, who makes her home in the Hampton Roads area, said she has three goals to accomplish if elected:

-“To work to create quality jobs all over the commonwealth that will provide people a decent standard of living and an opportunity to have benefits like healthcare.”

-“To work on education because we need to improve the high school graduation rate. We need to make science and technology exciting for students, so they go into those fields. We’re going to need them in the work force the next 20, 30 years to fill the kind of jobs we need to attract. We need to have career track education. It’s good for the state and good for the students.”

-“To work on transportation. I’ve been doing this since 2002 with Gov. (Mark) Warner. Bill Bolling never helped; this newfound interest in transportation is a curiosity to me because in order to grow our economy we need to be in a position where employees can get to work and employers can get their goods to market.”

She said she believes “the citizens of Virginia are entitled to a lieutenant governor who’s going to wake up every day and worry about the next generation, not the next election, and is going to make sure that our students, our kids start school prepared and leave school ready for the work force or for college.”

Wagner had been practicing law in Norfolk for about 20 years when Gov. Warner approached her in 2002 about serving as Virginia state treasurer. “We inherited a bit of a mess, to say the least,” she said. “Gov. (Jim) Gilmore had put the state in a position where rating agencies didn’t trust us; they thought we had been fiscally imprudent. The state was facing a deficit that ultimately became $6 billion.”

She said her job as state treasurer “was to work on balancing my agency’s budget, and we cut our budget 23 percent.” With the cuts, she said she was still able to provide “all the same services to the citizens, which is something I’m really proud of.”

“Because we didn’t have a degradation in services, I worked hard with the rating agencies and General Assembly to remedy the rating agencies’ concerns and ultimately, in 2004, our AAA credit rating was reaffirmed-and we balanced the budget.”

“In the course of that,” she added, “we also passed the 2004 Tax Reform Act, which allowed us to take the sales tax off food, which has been really meaningful to people in these hard times. It was passed bipartisan. One of the senators who voted no at the time was Bill Bolling.” She said he also was “against allowing us to make a landmark in K-12 and higher education,” which was essentially the budget bill.

When the occupant of the Governor’s Mansion changed, so did Wagner’s position in the state. “When Gov. (Timothy M.) Kaine became governor, he asked me to serve as secretary of finance, which is chief financial officer of the state.”

Just as had been the case when Warner was governor, Virginia claimed the Best Managed State title during Kaine’s administration. Kaine also has seen the Commonwealth recognized as “Best State to Do Business in” and “Best State in which to Raise a Child.”

“Today, when the world is facing fiscal economic disaster, which is largely the result of some failed economic policies of the eight years in the Bush administration,” Wagner said, “Virginia is a much better place than most other states. Our AAA credit rating was just reaffirmed and they said some very nice things about Virginia in it.”

She said Virginia has a lower unemployment rate than most other states, at 7.2 percent, while the national figure is 9.5 percent. “And we’ve been very forceful in dealing with the economic downturn since it’s happened.”

“Virginia’s not in a situation like California where we’re issuing IOUs. We’re running government the way it should be run-in a quality way.” She said her opponent has criticized revenue forecasts for the past few years. She also said Virginia has a bipartisan process and Bolling had been “invited every time we had a meeting with business executives. To my recollection, he never came.”

According to Wagner, “Virginia’s forecasting process is the envy of many states.” The National Association of Budget Officers pointed to Virginia “as being the right way to do things.”

“The reality is this economic downturn has had an affect on Virginia and everyone all over the world has been taken by surprise at the severity of it. But we’ve got to be grateful for where we are and work to recover.”

During Warner and Kaine’s administrations, Wagner said “we created about 200,000 jobs and those are jobs that are quality jobs that provide a salary and benefits in excess of whatever the local economy (standard in that community) provides. Those are the kinds of jobs we need to continue to create and I’m proud to have a part of working on those job creations as a member of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, the Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission, Virginia Tourism Corporation and the Virginia Small Business Financing Authority.”

As secretary of finance, Wagner said she has worked closely with the secretary of commerce and trade on job creation. “I’m proud of things we’ve brought to Virginia, like the Rolls Royce engine plant in Prince George County; but we need to continue that kind of activity, and we need to make sure that we have the tools to do so.”

“For the past seven years, both Warner and Kaine’s administrations have been asking for more money in the Governor’s Opportunity Fund, which is one of the tools we use for incentives. And I never once heard Bill Bolling advocating to pass it”-until the week of July 13.

Wagner also said she had “never seen Bill Bolling do anything with economic development in the seven years I’ve been working in state government.”

She said she has “a history of working in a bipartisan way with a lot of Republicans in the General Assembly.”

In 2008, she and Gov. Kaine introduced a bill “to make an historic investment in higher education all over the Commonwealth, including a medical school at VCU and investments on each community college campus to train the work force for the next several decades. That legislation got changed by both bodies; both committee chairs had a bill that passed unanimously in reconvened session. That’s the kind of cooperation we need to be doing in Richmond.”

Wagner came to Virginia 26 years ago with her husband Alan, an ophthalmologist. They have raised four children, with the oldest being 27 and the youngest 17. In the past few years, they started a small family business, Jody’s Popcorn/Confection/Gifts, specializing in popcorn.

For more information on her campaign, visit http://www.jodyforva.com/.

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