IN THE NEWS:

• During the pandemic, convenience store owners and truck stop owners benefited financially from having games similar to slot machines in their businesses. Now lawmakers are considering a bill that would bring them back permanently.

• Senator Danica Roem, a former journalist, knows that local governments often use exorbitant fees to restrict access to public documents. That's why she has a bill aimed at fixing the problem. Her bill would require local governments to offer eight free hours of researching FOIA requests -- billable hours that they can currently charge for.

• When Democrats were in control of the House, Senate, and governor's office, they failed to create a system to license people to sell marijuana. Then when Republicans took control of the House of Delegates, and further derailed the effort. Now, Senator Adam Ebbin of Alexandria has a bill that will create a system of people to have licenses to sell marijuana--but the Governor insists he's not interested in partaking.

At the Watercooler:

• The decision by a Richmond judge to release the report of last year's graduation shooting--and what the report shows.

• Some classing hazing in the General Assembly for the new cohort of legislators.

Episode Transcript

Michael Pope  

I'm Michael Pope.

Lauren Burke  

I'm Lauren Burke.

Michael Pope  

And this is Pod Virginia. A podcast that is now in the swing of the 2024 General Assembly session. Stuff is happening fast. Lauren, how's the session going for you so far?

Lauren Burke  

Oh, very busy. A lot is going on, as usual, hearings in the early morning hours.

Michael Pope  

Oh man, those 7:30am hearings.

Lauren Burke  

Members do this stuff. I really don't. It's crazy.

Michael Pope  

All right, let's get to our first story. Slot machine politics.

During the pandemic, convenience store and truckstop owners benefited financially from having games similar to slot machines in their businesses. Now, lawmakers are considering a bill that would bring them back permanently. Senator Adam Ebbin is a Democrat from Alexandria, who says he has concerns about that.

Adam Ebbin  

These machines are there when you're there to buy milk or eggs or chewing gum; regardless of your age, they can be enticing. And there's not really a great system or a secure system in place to keep underage people from losing money on them. 

Lauren Burke  

The bill to allow so-called skill games and convenience stores, truckstops, and restaurants was introduced by Senator Aaron Rouse, a Democrat from Virginia Beach.

Aaron Rouse  

Gaming is here in the state of Virginia. It's available on your mobile phones, as well. And to my knowledge, everyone has a mobile phone today. But I am interested in making sure that not only are the skill games safe but they are enforced to protect and ensure everyone involved can be protected. 

Michael Pope  

He wants to protect everybody. So Lauren, these machines used to be in convenience stores and truck stops. All over Virginia, they were called gray machines because they existed in what was then a gray area of the law. But then, late last year, a court determined it wasn't a gray area that they were just illegal. So, they were removed. So now what's happening is there's this huge coalition of business owners, people that owned the convenience stores and the truckstops. And they want this legislation that Aaron Rouse introduced. So, there are efforts to bring back skill games that were in convenience stores all over Virginia. There are a lot of new friends that Senator Rouse has, among all these convenience store owners. The pushback you hear, though, is, well, what if these things are predatory? Are these machines preying on low-income people who are bad at math and don't realize they're throwing their money away and that you go into a store hoping to buy milk or eggs. You're confronted with this machine that takes your money? I mean, so some debate's happening here about skill games.

Lauren Burke  

 When you say confronted by the machine, I have this mental picture of a machine with legs chasing somebody around the store. I think that most people want to do what they want to do, they want to play these games, it's sometimes fun, just like it is playing Mega Millions or Powerball or fan duel. And I do think that it's not necessarily predatory. I do think people just like having fun and taking risks and thinking about the idea of hitting the jackpot and all that other stuff. Even though it, of course, we all realize that it's statistically unlikely. But I do think that is because these convenience stores are making a lot of money off this. We should be thinking about them and how they benefit those small business owners. A group of people, I think both parties care about small business owners. 

Michael Pope  

The coalition of small business owners that want this legislation from Aaron Rouse is a huge coalition. In fact, I was in the committee hearing when he presented the bill, and you couldn't even get into the room. All the seats were filled. Everybody was standing at the back of the committee room. Here's this brand new building, a $500 million building, and they don't even have a committee room that's large enough to handle all the business owners that wanted to testify in favor of Rouse's bill. 

Lauren Burke  

And that's probably a good thing. I saw a few comments about the committee rooms not being big enough, even in the new General Assembly building. But I actually think it's a good thing. It shows interest in what's going on interest in our government and the new General Assembly, building rocks, and some of those bigger rooms are really cool. Yeah, it's pretty cool to see them filled out, actually. Everybody suspected that when we first saw those rooms, when we first did the tour, you could never imagine that they would be packed. But for something like this that involves money and small business, you're bound to get a sellout crowd for a hearing like that.

Michael Pope  

So, there is a little process here that's worth thinking about. The committee that Rouse presented his bill to was the Commerce and Labor Committee, which passed the bill, but they did not send it to Adam Ebbins General Laws committee. Instead, they sent it to Louise Lucas's Finance Committee. Louise Lucas is a big supporter of this bill. And Ebbin is a critic, as you heard in the audio there. When I talked to him, he was raising some concerns about this. And so there is a little bit of interesting parlor game politics here of bypassing Senator Ebbin and bypassing the General Laws Committee, which has jurisdiction over gambling. So you're taking this committee that has jurisdiction over this topic and bypassing it because the chairman of the committee is critical of your effort. That's something that might come back to haunt supporters of this in the future.

Yeah, that's a little power plan right there. Obviously, Senator Ebbin should have been the one to get to swing it. But when you have any topic, you know, it is when anything has this much money involved in this many lobbyists running around. It doesn't surprise me that we see something like that. 

In his column for the Richmond Times Dispatch, Jeff Schapiro said this is a kind of powerplay that reminds him of something that Ed Willie would have done in the old days, sort of the puppet master of the Senate. So we will see what happens with that. So, let's move on to our next story. Public documents Senator Danica Roem is a Democrat from Prince William County and also a former journalist. So, she knows that local governments often use exorbitant fees to restrict access to public documents. So that's why she has a bill aimed at fixing the problem. 

Danica Roem  

When I have a constituent, who is charged $8,800 to see a video and emails about her autistic daughter being dragged off of a school bus by two adults who used their knees to push her. That means the system is broken. 

Lauren Burke  

Her bill requires local governments to offer eight free hours of researching FOIA requests, billable hours that they can currently charge for. Joe Lerch at the Virginia Association of Counties is opposed to the bill. 

Joe Lerch  

Our members are concerned about the impacts and the administrative burden, even beyond the added costs for the free hours. In addition, we're hearing from our members that they're getting more FOIA requests year after year, and it seems to be increasing.

Michael Pope  

Yeah, so the Association of Counties is really not on board with this Municipal League, which is the group of cities in Virginia; they're not on board with this. But let me tell you what happened in the committee hearing where Roem presented the bill; they decided not to vote on it that day but give it another week to see if maybe they could negotiate something where the local governments would say, yeah, we can accept this amount of free FOIA time.

Lauren Burke  

Yeah, eight free hours is a lot, actually. But I will say that at this point in the digital age, we live in a technology age. I would think that some of these small jurisdictions would be able to fix this problem a lot easier than they would have been 20 or 30 years ago. As you know, and I don't need to tell you, Michael, the Commonwealth of Virginia has some of the worst FOIA laws in the United States. And it is amazing to me how easy it is to get documents in other jurisdictions in other states, even on the local level. I will say that I did recently make a FOIA request for the travel of Governor Youngkin to Taiwan to the Paris Air Show and to Texas when he went to see the National Guard and did that late last year. And they expedited that pretty quickly. And as somebody who's worked in, you know, several government offices, including Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, Justin Fairfax, we used to get four requests on a regular basis. And it was no big heavy burden. And I'm not saying it's easy for the smaller local governments. Still, I am saying that, yes, you can build into the law certain stipulations that people can't just request everything in every email. In most FOIA laws across the country, you do have to specify a specific time period for a specific piece of information. So you don't have the nuisance factor. So it would be good, though, just globally. And generally, if Virginia had better FOIA laws, just as a general statement here.

Michael Pope  

The nuisance factor is something that the lawmakers are really going to have to make sure that they have an accounting of. It's one thing for people like you and me to submit FOIA requests because we're not abusive about it. But there are lots of people who are not even journalists; I'm sure you've met these kinds of local activists. They'll submit a new FOIA request every day. And so there, you do have to have rules to guard against people being abusive with FOIA requests.

Lauren Burke  

Yeah, I remember a FOIA request that came in from Judicial Watch, I'm sure they will probably do that to several democratic offices, I think back in, like, 2020. Because, you know, it's a politically driven thing. But my attitude, as somebody who's worked in the government and worked in the private sector and in the press, my attitude in my government jobs was always that. We're serving the people, and they should see what we're doing. And we shouldn't be doing anything that we should be nervous about when FOIA requests come in. That's not something that should be happening anyway. But certainly expediting the request, to the point that Joe Lerch was making, does take resources and does take someone to work on that request, no doubt. And so sure, there should be some compromise in terms of how you exactly expedite that when it comes to staffing. But from a technology standpoint, I'm old enough to remember in my first job as a teenager, you know, the age of the typewriter in the warehouse, that's gone. I mean, it should be a lot easier from a technological standpoint to expedite FOIA requests.

Michael Pope  

All right, let's move on to our next story. Blunt opposition, so when Democrats were in control of the House, the Senate, and the governor's office, they failed to create a system for licensing people to sell marijuana. Then, when Republicans controlled the House of Delegates, they totally derailed the effort. Now, Senator Adam Ebbin of Alexandria has a bill that would create a new system for people to have licenses to sell marijuana. 

Adam Ebbin  

Over the past few years, the illicit market has skyrocketed from an estimated $1.8 billion a year in 2021 to $2.4 billion a year in 2023. Instead of being reinvested in our communities, tens of millions of unrealized dollars in taxes are lining the pockets of organized crime.

Lauren Burke  

Governor Glenn Youngkin has repeatedly said he is not interested in creating licenses to sell marijuana. Delegate Paul Krizek is a Democrat from Fairfax County who introduced the House version of the bill.

Paul Krizek  

We work hard in the General Assembly to get the best legislation possible, and we give it to the governor, and he has a chance to either veto it, amend it, or sign it. And so we'll see what happens. 

Michael Pope  

Not interested sounds like a veto. 

Paul Krizek  

We'll see how the pen works when it gets the bill.

Michael Pope  

That's the sound of me stalking Delegate Krizek as he was getting off of the house floor, walking down a stairwell, and trying to get to a committee meeting. I'm shoving a microphone at his face. But he didn't answer the question. The governor has said over and over again, not interested, not interested, not interested. I get the sense he doesn't want to be the governor who legalized marijuana. It's not really the marketing he wants for himself. But this is a problem; Virginia is leaving money on the table. Maryland has figured this out; they've got a licensing system. All this tax revenue that would be coming to Virginia is not going to the state. It's not going to fund services for you and me; instead, it's going to the drug cartels. I mean, so, like, this is a problem.

Lauren Burke  

Yeah, I don't know why a governor or Republican talks about small business. I taught a small business class at Virginia State University and all this, and that isn't thinking in terms of a boutique market or a small seller's market for this particular topic. Which, when you look around the country, is taking a lot of state legislatures by storm. But it's always medical marijuana, so it's the big cannabis corporations rather than the small boutique market. We know for a fact that marijuana has been completely destructive in terms of the war on drugs in Black communities. I think that the sort of motivation behind a lot of the folks who wanted to have the boutique market was to correct that history.

Michael Pope  

The Social Equity licenses. 

Lauren Burke  

Yeah, it's exactly the social equity issue. And I can remember back in 2020, Senator Favola and Senate Ebbins arguing and talking about this on the Senate floor. And that is, to me, a very good idea. And it's amazing how suddenly that can happen. Or it's tethered to something that's controlled by the bigger cannabis conglomerates. It's not something that makes any sense to me from just the standpoint of where the policy is going. When it comes to marijuana. 

Michael Pope  

I'm curious to see what kind of influence Louise Lucas can exert here. So, I mean, she is holding the keys to power here from her position as Chairwoman of the Senate Finance Committee. Governor Youngkin is not going to get his arena unless Louise Lucas says yes to it. So, will there be some horse trading here where Louise Lucas tells the governor, will you put your signature on this bill to create a licensing system, and you can have your Arena in Alexandria? Do you think that kind of a deal might get struck?

Lauren Burke  

I think the governor just listening to him closely every time this comes up. He really sounds like he is really against it. It's a very consistent sound, and his voice and body language and everything else tells me that this is not something he's going to be horsetrading. Now, maybe, yeah, if the stakes got as high as Potomac yards or a boutique market for weed. I doubt that it would come to that. But if it did, maybe he'd think about it. But boy, does he sound like he's against it. When you were talking to him after the State of the Commonwealth, when he did the scrum after the speech. And that question came up; he really kind of got stiff and sort of just said the same talking point over and over again. 

Michael Pope  

not interested, not interested. 

Lauren Burke  

I would really be surprised if that changed. 

Michael Pope  

All right, let's play a round of trivia. So last week, we asked you which unlucky lieutenant governor is about to be removed from the Senate chamber. When the official portrait of Justin Fairfax is installed. The answer is Taylor Ellyson.

Lauren Burke  

We have a winner: the social media account for the Library of Virginia responded with the correct answer. 

Michael Pope  

Yes, I'm gonna fanboy here for the Library of Virginia. I love the Library of Virginia. It's so great to hear from our friends and their social media accounts. Actually, Lauren, I was at the Library of Virginia last week for a reception to honor the Librarian of Virginia who is retiring. So it was great to see all my friends from the library. Also, it was just kind of fun to be in the building again; I spent many hours there in the local history collection, in the reading room, in special collections, and all over the building, researching the history of the Byrd machine. So, I'm just the biggest fan of the Library of Virginia. So if I can hear from them and have them win our trivia contest, that's just a really big deal for me personally.

Lauren Burke  

Yeah, the Library of Virginia is great, and they've got great Wi-Fi. 

Michael Pope  

And parking. 

Lauren Burke  

And parking. That's right.

Michael Pope  

Actually, that's the secret of downtown Richmond. You have to be actually doing some kind of business or research at the library. But they do have a great, great parking deck under the building. 

Lauren Burke  

Yes, indeed, they do. We also heard from Pod Virginia superfan Pete Gibson, who saw the portrait and suggested his name was Mustache Anderson. 

Michael Pope  

Yeah, it's the Best wrong answer. The portraits in the Senate chamber are really interesting because they're all of former lieutenant governors. But it's a select group of former lieutenant governors. If the Lieutenant Governor became an actual governor, his portrait would be in a different part of the building up on the third floor. So, the Senate chamber has no portrait of Lieutenant Governor Kaine. The Senate chamber has no portrait of Lieutenant Governor Northam. It's only the LGs who did not become governor. So it's a very select group of people. And yet, poor Taylor Ellyson is about to get bumped from the chamber. When the portrait of your old boss is installed. 

Lauren Burke  

Yeah, the third floor is a wonderful place to hide. It is beautiful up there. It's quiet, and very few people know about it. And the portraits in the chamber are beautiful. There's going to be some diversity, though, because Doug Wilder is on the third floor. The 41st Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax is going to be in the chamber, and so will our 42nd Lieutenant Governor Winsome Sears. Which will incredibly have two black lieutenant governors in a row. Right now, I will say my favorite portrait in there is the Don Beyer portrait. I just like the portrait. And there's something cool about the whole Don Beyer thing because every time you go to the Library of Virginia and research photography and you see the photos of Doug Wilder, there's always Don Beyer standing right there. At the swearing-in, it was pretty cool, and his portraits were really cool.

Michael Pope  

Yeah, Don Beyers's portrait actually has a lot of stuff happening in it. It's really interesting because, first of all, Don Beyer is not looking directly at you in the portrait; it's more of a profile. So that's an interesting artistic decision. And then there's like, there's like a piano in the painting and either a convex or concave mirror, I always get those screwed up. But one of those interesting mirrors, that you see a wide landscape of things that are going on, just a very interesting portrait. My favorite portrait, Lauren, since we're talking about that, is the portrait of Henry Howell, who was a big figure in the Bryd machine era. And it's he's in such a prominent place in the Senate, right by the door, that he frequently is in the background, like anytime the Majority Leader speaks or the minority leader, there is the portrait of Henry Howell staring over his shoulder.

Lauren Burke  

Very nice, there is very nice artwork going on in the building. And it's just super cool. Okay, so what's our trivia question for next week?

Michael Pope  

Okay, so I am going to steal a trivia question from one of the hazing questions that happened on the Senate floor last week. That involves somebody who was born in Newmarket, Virginia, who later went on to become the first governor of the temporary State of Franklin and then a sixth-term governor of Tennessee. So who was this man who was born in Newmarket, who became the governor of Franklin and also the governor of Tennessee? Now, you might be saying to yourself, what the heck is the State of Franklin? I've never heard of the State of Franklin. It's basically the easternmost part of Tennessee, which was very briefly a temporary state in the 1780s. This man from Virginia was governor of the Free State of Franklin before he went on to become the governor of all of Tennessee. So, who was this man who was governor of these two states, born in Virginia? 

Lauren Burke  

Every time I see these trivia questions, I've got a degree in history, and I feel like I need to go back to school. 

Michael Pope  

Well, Pod Virginia is your schoolhouse. So, if you think you know the answer, submit the question on social media. Hey, you might even win a prize. All right, let's head over to the water cooler. Lauren, what's the latest you're hearing around the watercooler? 

Lauren Burke  

I want to talk about the decision by Richmond Circuit Judge W. Reilly Marchant to release the report that was prepared by the Richmond school system on the mass shootings. This tragic mass shooting took place on June 6th, 2023. At the Huguenot High School graduation, taking place at Altria Theater on the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University. Unfortunately, seven people were shot, and two people were killed. Shawn Jackson, who was only 18, and his father, Renzo Smith. A report was done, effectively an after-action report on the shooting. The school board effectively tried to hide the report from the public, and the Richmond Times Dispatch and CBS 6 Richmond sued to get the report public. And it ended up being a full-blown trial, which really surprised me because typically, with FOIA requests, you're not in a full-blown trial with a witness list and members of the school board and the superintendent of the school system outside of the courtroom and eight hours of testimony, but it in fact, did happen. And what happens next is the judge said, let me read the thing and decide whether or not I'm going to make it public. That took him less than 48 hours. And he ruled this is going to be public. And sure enough, not only in words, in his ruling, but common sense would tell you that what really sort of happened here it looks like is that the Richmond school system decided that they were going to engage a law firm to put the report behind attorney-client privilege in an attempt to hide it from the public. And the reason for that is fairly obvious. There's a cause of action, and there's a civil lawsuit coming, I would think. A wrongful death suit, if I had to guess. There was a lot that happened here that is in the report and confirmed in the report with regard to whether or not the alleged shooter and murder of two people should have been at this graduation should have been allowed to be at graduation. It certainly looks like that person should not have been allowed to be at the graduation. There's also some controversy out there with regard to whether or not metal detect vectors were up and whether or not security was adequate. But the bottom line of this is that Judge Marchant really did lay it down in terms of saying, look, the government cannot set up an attorney client privilege wall, and then claim that something is going to have to be private because a law firm was engaged. So that was an interesting thing to watch.

Michael Pope  

Yeah, the thing that's infuriating about this story is that this is a document that was already available. So earlier in the podcast, we talked about local governments often, saying boohoo about all the staff time that we're gonna have to invest in putting together a response to your FOIA requests. Well, no, like this is a document. Just share the document. It's a big red flag when the government says we're not giving it to you. 

Lauren Burke  

Yeah. In fact, the document had been shared with members of the Richmond school board; they just weren't allowed to have a copy of it. So they were shown the report, they could not make a copy or take a copy out of the meeting in the close session where they were showing the report. But two of the members came out and said, Wow, this was bad. And there were mistakes made, and so that's what kind of started the cascade of a shout-out to Tyler Layne at CBS 6, who testified at trial. He already was asking for the report. And the more people more people are asking for the report, of course, the question becomes, what are they hiding? And, of course, what they were hiding was liability, probable legal liability. So that is where that lands, and we'll see what happens next. What about you, Michael, what's the latest? You've heard about the water cooler? 

Michael Pope  

Well, people are buzzing about all of the hazing that happens in the General Assembly, not mean hazing, but sort of good-natured fun hazing. So when a new member has a bill, this happens in the committee and also on the floor. Other members will ask them silly questions just to haze them a little bit with their new bill. It actually works best when the bill is not particularly controversial, or, oftentimes, it'll be a charter change. And so, actually, there were a few of those last week on the Senate floor when new senators had something minor in terms of a charter change. And then you get all kinds of questions such as, so if it's a charter change for Smithfield, this actually happened with Senator Emily Jordan, so Bill Stanley was asking her, what's the population of Smithfield? How many people? What's the total area, you know, landmass? How many words are in your bill? How many characters are in your bill, like all these silly questions, and you got to sleep? You have to think on your feet and respond to them in some kind of way. Senator Surovell was hazing Russet Perry by asking her some pretty detailed legal questions. For example, he asked her to distinguish between a residence and a domicile. And so they had a little back and forth. This is fun for lawyers, I guess. So, returning, I should say Senator Sturtevant had a bill and was also hazed. Stewart asked him about the charter bills. Boysko was hazing Sturtevant a little bit and asked him about Colonial Heights. Sturtevant bragged that his district has the largest Arby's in the country. I think we need to fact-check that I don't know about that. The hazing of Saddam Salam was interesting because I said earlier that this hazing usually works best with a charter bill or bill that's frankly, not controversial, or, you know, the kind of thing where you would get into a debate, but then said I'm so lame is bill actually was one of those bills, a In fact, it was a party-line vote on a bill that would have changed the sentence for minor misdemeanors of people who might be deported. So, I am actually changing the sentence from some of these minor misdemeanors from 365 days to 364 days, which is a very small tweak that is aimed at federal law to prevent those people from being deported. And it's funny because, like, servo actually started hazing Salim a little bit. Then, all the Republicans got up to speak about how they were in opposition to the bill. And then it actually turned into a discussion of the bill as opposed to a hazing. So, yeah, obviously, we got like extra haze.

Lauren Burke  

You got haze, you got haze, and then he really got hazed by the Republicans. That's funny. There are a lot of cute little things that happen on the Senate floor that are very enjoyable to watch, including the hazing of the Lieutenant Governor and the gavel. They have a gavel hiding thing that they do. Yeah, that's

Michael Pope  

later in the session. Right? Like, I guess, toward the end of the session, everybody gets really bored because they're waiting for people to come out of conference committees. They've literally got nothing to do while they're waiting for these conference reports. And so they do this thing where they were hiding the gavel, hide the LGs gavel.

Lauren Burke  

When I say had the gavel, I mean had the gavel. Like that thing can not be found. And there is this big delay and all this. Yeah, some funny things happen. I have to go back and look at the video. Watching Senator Salim out there has been great. He's one of the youngest senators, and it's great seeing him out there and making his way through the Virginia Senate.

Michael Pope  

Let's head over to the Pod Virginia mailbag. Lauren, what are our listeners talking about? 

Lauren Burke  

Brian Devine heard our discussion about the lack of public access to public documents and chimed in on Twitter to say, "Virginia has the worst FOIA policies in the country." Amen to that.

Michael Pope  

I totally agree with that. The worst FOIA policies in the country, especially for police documents and incident reports. So, some lawmaker who's listening to this podcast should really take a look at the Florida Sunshine Law and figure out a way that you and I can have better access to police documents. 

Lauren Burke  

That's a really long overdue situation, to say the least. I don't know what it's going to take. Going back to the Library of Virginia for a second, there's a bunch of papers from former governors that have been jammed up for a long time. And we're talking going back twenty to forty years; you would think that those documents would be available by now. But again, the FOIA laws are what they are.

Michael Pope  

What you're talking about is more of a tech technology backlog. A good example of this is the Kaine administration. So the papers of the Kaine administration, sit down because this is gonna shock you, still being processed. Kaine was governor. How many years ago was that? But yeah, the governor's papers are a really important part of what they do at the Library of Virginia. So you can go and look at, for example, the papers of Harry Bryd, which I spent a lot of time digging through, not all, but a lot of the papers of Harry Bryd. So you go and like they give you the finding agent, and they say this folder has the discussion about a road building program. This folder discusses crop failures. And so you go to the folder that you think that you're looking for something, and it'll be his the governor's entire correspondence. And they're actually archived really well. It would be like the letter from the constituent to the governor, the governor's response, and maybe even a letter back. So it's literally reading through somebody's email. The problem is when a real email is created. The explosion of government documents because of the internet and email has created a backlog. So yes,  the more modern governor's papers are tied up in a technological backlog. But fortunately for me, Harry Byrd's papers were very much available.

Lauren Burke  

I am a document nerd. So I'm very interested in all this for your talk.

Michael Pope  

I think our listeners are probably also document nerds. So we're all among friends here. So, hey, let's celebrate some birthdays this week. 

Lauren Burke  

Today, Monday, January 22nd. Is the birthday of Senator Louise Lucas of Portsmouth/

Michael Pope  

Tuesday, January 23rd, is the birthday of delegate Phillip Scott of Spotsylvania. So, happy birthday, Delegate Scott, and happy birthday, Chairwoman Louise Lucas.

Lauren Burke  

Yes, indeed. That's it for this episode of Pod Virginia.