2019 General Assembly Call to Action

Dear State Park Supporters:

I wanted to take a moment to update everyone on this year’s VERY EXCITING 2019 General Assembly action. Your VAFP Advocacy committee has been very busy this session. Thanks to all that have written, called, and visited our State Legislators resulting in an unprecedented 32 budget amendments! These amendments don’t even include the additional four that are included in the Governor’s budget.

All of our proposed amendments have been introduced by members of the Senate and House. VaLORS SB1480 was unanimously passed by the Senate Finance Committee, and has sailed through the floor on a 40-0 vote! VaLORS will now be passed to the House Appropriations Committee (click here for members), where with your support, it may FINALLY become a reality for our Conservation Officers.

With so many Bills on the “line” for State Parks this year, I am not going to list them all in this letter. I am, however, including links at the end to a summary of the Member Amendments, a chart of those Amendments, a summary of the Governor's Amendments, the VAFP one page advocacy document, and a list of Delegates and Senators that shows the representatives for your park.

FOLKS, IT’S RALLY TIME!!

Please take a moment to reach out to your representative and ask for their support to fund our Bills! It is critical that they hear from as many voters as possible. Reach out to your Friends Group members, neighbors, co-workers and State Park enthusiasts to support our effort.

Virginia State Parks is literally on the 30 yard line driving to the goal, and we have the very best opportunity in years to help them score a victory in the General Assembly!

If you wish to follow the progress of our Amendments in the General Assembly, click here. The Budget Bills are a little trickier to follow than regular legislation since all of the amendments fall under HB1700 or SB1100. Clicking "Member Request" under each of the House and Senate bills will let you look up the individual amendments.

Feel free to reach out to me with questions at timkennellvafp@gmail.com. Thank you for your support of Virginia State Parks.

TIM

Tim Kennell

President

Virginia Association for Parks

To access the documents below, click on the link or copy and paste the url in your browser

VAFP One Page Advocacy Document

http://www.virginiaparks.org/document/2019-vafp-one-page-advocacy-document.pdf

Member Budget Amendments - Summaries

http://www.virginiaparks.org/document/2019-budget-amendment-summaries.pdf

Member Budget Amendments - Chart

http://www.virginiaparks.org/document/2019-budget-amendments-impacting-state-parks.pdf