Story by Chris Graham

A funny thing happened on the way to get-rid-of-Russ Potts-fest that was brewing this spring in the 27th Senate District.

Potts, a four-term incumbent who had fallen into disfavor with some Republicans in the district that stretches from Winchester into Northern Virginia, announced in February that he is not running for re-election.

This wasn’t, for the record, the worst news in the world for his would-be challengers - Warrenton attorney Jill Holtzman Vogel and Middleburg businessman Mark Tate.

It had appeared that the two might risk splitting the votes of hardline conservatives in a three-way race with the moderate-conservative Potts.

Now the two are left to fight it out amongst themselves as to who is the more conservative of the two.

“I am a committed conservative - and I believe deeply in conservative values. And I believe that that’s really what makes Virginia great. If you think about the principles that the nation was founded on, and the strength of what our Commonwealth has been able to achieve, it’s because we’re conservative - and conservative means preserving the best of what you have, but also being able to take that and decide, well, when is it time to modernize and move into the future?” says Holtzman Vogel, a member of the board of directors of the Virginia Conservative Action PAC and former chief counsel to the Republican National Committee.

“I’ve been involved in politics for almost two decades in the district and in Loudoun County - and I’ve been involved in a lot of movements preventing tax increases and on the power-lines issue and the movement to give counties more tools to control and pay for growth,” says Tate, one of the founders of the citizen interest group Virginians for Sensible Energy Policies and a former Middleburg vice mayor who fell 106 votes short of upsetting Potts in a 2003 Republican Party primary in the 27th.

“I’ve also been very involved with the pro-life movement in the Commonwealth of Virginia - and have been involved personally and politically in pro-family issues. I chaired the Loudoun effort for the marriage amendment - and I’ve been very involved in pro-life issues on the charitable end as well as the political end,” Tate says.

The specter of Potts does hang over the race in the 27th District in one key area - the debate over transportation that Potts highlighted in his controversial 2005 independent run for governor.

“It’s such a big issue for us because all of us sit in traffic all day long. We live in this beautiful rural community, and yet we can’t get from Point A to Point B - and there’s just no excuse for that,” Holtzman Vogel says.

“I am uniquely predisposed to focus on that issue - because for a lot of my professional career, I have lived in either the Valley or in the Piedmont, and I’ve had to drive to either Fairfax or Washington because I have clients there or have worked there. And every hour that I’m sitting on 50 or 29 or 66, it’s an hour of my life that I can never get back - and my kids can never get back,” Holtzman Vogel says.

“Here’s what you have to consider - while the population has grown a little in the past 10 years, the spending in government has doubled. And you have to ask yourself the question, Well, why is that? If it doubled, then where is the return that I’m supposed to be getting for my dollar? As a regular person who pays taxes, I think this every day - that before they dare to come back to me and ask me for my next dollar, I want to know that I’m getting my money’s worth for the first dollar that I put in. And I think it’s fair and legitimate for people to say, I’m not,” Holtzman Vogel says.

“We have to ask the question, Why are my roads not fixed? Why is our education system not first in the nation? This is the commitment that I believe the Commonwealth has to make - that we do the core things first, and do them well, before you go and start spending money on a lot of other things,” Holtzman Vogel says.

“Fundamentally what we need is reform in (the Virginia Department of Transportation) - in how we fund transportation and make transportation decisions, and bringing a link between land use and transportation decisions” Tate says.

“I think VDOT has failed to provide transportation solutions - and it hasn’t been because they haven’t had more money. Since 2004, their budget has gone up more than 50 percent. The last decade, the Commonwealth of Virginia government has increased its budget 111 percent. It’s not because we don’t have enough tax dollars. In fact, when Jerry Baliles was governor, we tried to solve the transportation problem by instituting the largest tax increase in Virginia history at that time - and we created a transportation trust fund to reserve money for transportation projects - and it didn’t work,” Tate says.

“I would make the argument now that just raising taxes isn’t going to solve the problem. We need to get a grip on how growth affects transportation. We need to prioritize transportation improvements that are created to reduce congestion. And we need to reform how they make their decisions at VDOT and how they spend the money,” Tate says.

Filed under: 7-April 2007 Issue