Delegate Tom Rust : Representing the 86th District

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The Rust Report

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Posted: February 06, 2009

Greetings!

This past week has been by far the busiest week of the session. As I have written previously, all House bills, excluding budget bills will have to be heard and transmitted to the Senate by this Tuesday. This week, many of my bills have come before various committees and most have passed. Next week I will be writing a review of all of my bills and their progress. I would like to remind you that you can track all of my bills at anytime by clicking here.

Higher Education

For the last two weeks there have been many speeches given on the floor about limiting the number of out of state students for our state colleges. On the floor, various delegates have related anecdotal stories from their home districts of students with perfect or near perfect grades and high SAT scores, who have not been admitted into our Virginia flagship colleges and universities. This seems to be a particular problem for us in Northern Virginia. Virginia publically financed colleges and universities have an obligation to educate Virginians. I agree there is a problem when a valedictorian with a perfect grade point average and high SAT scores cannot be admitted to a Virginia university so that an out-of-state student can be admitted. To remedy this, various bills have been introduced including House Bills: 1696, 2082, 2324, 2325, and 2475. These bills impose different caps for the percentages of out-of-state students a school can admit. Currently, all of these bills are waiting to be heard by the House Appropriations Committee. Like everything, funds are the issue as the cost to limit the out of state students is significant. As an example, 31% of the students at the University of Virginia are out of state; those students pay 62% of the university's entire tuition. I have and will continue to support measures which allow our best and brightest students to attend our flagship universities.

Autism Bill

My office has received a great number of constituent e-mails, calls, and visits urging me to support HB 1588, known as the Autism Bill. This past year, I have attended numerous meetings to learn all that I can about autism in Virginia. Since the start of the session, I had been "inclined to support" the bill, but I did have at least one remaining concern. The bill, in its original form, only applied to individuals and certain businesses. The state of Virginia, local governments, school boards, and self insured companies were all exempt from this bill. It was my conviction that if the bill was to be enacted by the State with support from local governments, then they should not be exempt from the bill.

Notwithstanding that concern, and in response to all of the heartfelt concerns of my constituents and discussions with the bill's Patron, I signed onto the bill as a co-patron. Unfortunately, the bill was heard in the Commerce and Labor Subcommittee #1, which failed to make a motion to report. Based on the comments of the committee members, work is being done in the Appropriations Committee to include additional funds in the budget to provide more financial support, particularly for the area of early intervention, to help these children. If that occurs, I will certainly support any such action just as I would have supported the original bill.

Smoking Ban

Yesterday, the Speaker of the House announced that a compromise was struck with the Democrats in the House, the Senate, and the Governor to prohibit smoking in restaurants with certain key exceptions. The exceptions include restaurants with a designated smoking room that is physically separated and independently ventilated from non-smoking dining areas, any permanent outdoor patio area of a restaurant, any portion of a restaurant that is used exclusively for private functions, any private club as well as street-side "hotdog" stands and other mobile points of food service. I am very pleased that the Speaker of the House reached out to the Governor to facilitate this compromise. Many constituents have contacted me over the years about these bills, and I have always supported efforts that move Virginia to being a more smoke-free state. I look forward to voting in favor of this bill.

Visitors

This week we were pleased to meet with members from the elected leaders from Herndon and Loudoun, the Jewish Council, representative nurses from our district, and a group from NASA.

Please do not hesitate to contact me in Richmond should there be an issue of concern to you. I can be reached by e-mail at DelTRust@house.state.va.us or by phone at 804-698-1086.

My Best,

Tom Rust

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