Wow, Mark Warner certainly isn't relaxing in his last few weeks as Governor of Virginia, that's for sure! Just in the past 24 hours, Warner has done two important things that will live on long after he is out of office.First, Warner announced yesterday that he will ask for $242.5 million for the Chesapeake Bay when he submits his 2-year budget plan to the General Assembly this Friday. According to the Roanoke Times:
Most of the new money -- about $200 million -- will go toward sewage treatment plant upgrades in the bay watershed to meet new discharge standards adopted last month by the state Water Control Board.
If adopted, Warner's proposal will represent "the largest single contribution any state in the bay watershed has made" to Chesapeake Bay restoration, meaning that Mark Warner has a chance to be remembered as one of Virginia's greatest environmental governors. This is critically important, given that the Chesapeake Bay Foundation?s annual State of the Bay report recently gave the Bay an overall health rating of ?D.? In other words, the Chesapeake Bay - one of America's treasures - is in critical condition, in dire need of help right now.
Luckily, it looks like Warner's plan has a great chance of passage. For starters, Warner "made the announcement in his Cabinet room surrounded by supportive lawmakers from both parties" Even better, those lawmakers included one of the most important, House of Delegates Speaker Bill Howell, who called the Warner plan "a true shot in the arm" for the Bay. Great stuff, and the result of four years of hard work getting Virginia back into the black so that it actually has money to spend on important stuff like this.
Second, just today, Mark Warner announced that, in lart part thanks to his initiative, two innocent Virginians had been exonerated for rapes they did not commit. According to the Washington Post:
The revelations are the result of modern-day testing Warner ordered more than a year ago of biological samples that had been collected in thousands of violent criminal cases dating back to the 1970s and 1980s. Those samples were collected before leaps in the forensic science.Now that those tests have revealed that two more innocent men were jailed, Warner is ordering all of the files and others in state custody-- about 660 boxes that contain thousands of cases from 1973 through 1988 -- to be examined for cases that can be retested using the latest DNA technology.
[...]
Warner's order last fall marked the first time a state has ordered testing without a specific request from an inmate and placed Virginia at the forefront of a national debate over post-conviction DNA.
Saving the Bay and saving two innocent men from prison sentences they didn't deserve. Not bad for a day's work, huh? Nice job, Presid...er, Governor Warner!