A lot going on around the Monumental move to NoVa, so to make the most of the latest, JP Finlay brought in his guy Drew Wilder, who covers northern Virginia for NBC4, for this take on how the deal is still alive and actually about to clear a major hurdle.
“Two bills were introduced, one in Virginia Senate, one in Virginia's House,” Wilder said. “The one in the Senate isn't going anywhere, it’s too late to move forward on it, but the one in the House is moving forward. That bill is going to get its final vote in the House of Delegates today, and once it passes, they can take that bill and move it to the Senate, and then the work on that bill effectively starts again in the other chamber. They work on it, discuss it, maybe make some changes, and then basically, it goes back and forth until both chambers agree on the exact same language. If that happens, it goes to the Governor, and we know that he's gonna sign it. So, we expect, the next major hurdle to be probably cleared here in the next couple of hours.”
But, still, nowhere close to a done deal.
“It’s not a done deal, although when you hear Ted or Gov.
Youngkin talk about it, it sure sounds like it,” Wilder said. “Democrats control Virginia's General Assembly right now, and that’s not to say that they're not on board with it, but they are very clear that this arena project is the Governor's priority, and the Democrats are very direct about having priorities, too. If you give us some of our priorities, we will give you your arena, at least at the state level. It could run into problems at the city level.
What the issue is now, is that the bills being discussed is actually one to set up a “Virginia Sports Authority,” a ‘quasi-government body’ that would take on the debt of the project and issue bonds to manage the financing, and then manage the actual facilities in Alexandria.
That is what the Senate Finance Committee was refusing to do, and again, politics.
“This thing could go through the House and it could get to the Senate where some leadership Democrats have been very outspoken against this project, because Youngkin hasn't agreed even in terms of handshake to give them the priorities that they want, like a minimum wage increase, and an actual working marketplace to begin the sale and distribution of legal recreational cannabis,” Wilder said. “Until the Governor agrees to do that, I'm not sure Democrats are gonna give him this arena project that he so desperately wants. The possibility of this dying is very real.”
And part of that is a fail-safe that the House bill had added to it in the eleventh hour?
“he latest version of this bill had a late change to it to add a re-enactment clause where if the bill passes, the Virginia General Assembly needs to come back in one year and then effectively pass it again,” Wilder said. “There wouldn't really be any changes to it, but it gives Democrats a kill switch; if everything passes and the Governor signs the arena bill, but he doesn't give Democrats their recreational marijuana or their minimum wage increase or whatever else, they could pull the plug a year from now. So there's a lot still in limbo on this, and he vote today should not be considered anything near final.”
Wilder believes that in the simplest terms, there is bipartisan support to a degree, but as he joked, ‘this is politics, baby.’
“Today doesn’t mean anything final, but what it could do is it could maybe finally peel back the curtain a little bit and let us actually get a sense of what a larger pool of Virginia's lawmakers are thinking,” Wilder said. “We had some fiery rhetoric from Senate Democrats about where they're at, but there has not been a single moment of actual political public debate about any of this. That was the entire reason why, according to lawmakers, they introduced these bills in both chambers, so it had to go through the political process and get it out in front of the public. They haven't done any of that, but today, we’ll see the split of the vote, and maybe hear a little debate about how people are feeling about this.”
