From the desk of Delegate Danny Marshall:
The 2024 session of the Virginia General Assembly gaveled into session last week. There are a whole lot of fresh faces in Richmond. The year-to-year turnover in the House and Senate was the greatest since before the Civil War.
Democrats now control the House of Delegates by a 51-to-49 margin. Their first order of business last week was to elect Del. Don Scott of Portsmouth as the Speaker of the House. Scott is the first African-American to serve as House Speaker in Virginia. I congratulate him on this honor and look forward to working with him in the very near future.
One of Scott’s first actions as Speaker was to select this year’s House committee assignments. I had requested to keep the committee appointments I had last year. Those include seats on the House Appropriations Committee, the newly-renamed Labor and Commerce Committee and the Committee on Agriculture, Chesapeake and Natural Resources. I am pleased to announce that Speaker Scott reappointed me to all three of those committees.
The Appropriations Committee is a key appointment. This is the panel that handles all spending bills in the House of Delegates. I am very pleased that Speaker Scott is returning me to this committee.
Soon after the committee appointments were announced, I was named to the new Speaker’s Select Committee on Rural Health Care in Virginia. The panel will explore the unique challenges of delivering healthcare outside of Virginia’s Urban Crescent. In 2023 the Weldon Cooper Center at the University of Virginia reported that our rural communities tend to be older, household incomes tend to be lower, and up to 23% of children live in poverty in some localities. In recent years, rural hospitals have had to make major cutbacks to make ends meet. Last summer, Sentara Halifax Regional Hospital, which is in the 49th House District that I represent, eliminated their obstetrics unit. Moves like this and others that rural health care providers have to take in order to make ends meet leads to suffering for rural residents.
The Committee is charged with coming up with at least five broad health policy recommendations that will be considered in the 2025 session of the Virginia General Assembly.
I have introduced several pieces of legislation to address local and regional issues. I will cover these in future newsletters while updating constituents on their progress.
If you are interested in tracking legislation this year, the General Assembly has an plenty of tools for you to follow a bill’s progress. Go to https://virginiageneralassembly.gov/. You can view committee hearings and floor sessions live. You can also view them in the website’s archive.
If you have any questions or need more information, please contact me at
