The governor spoke at length about the reasons she blocked Democratic priorities, such as expanding collective bargaining rights and addressed the public outcry over her vetoes.
Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger recently got some things off her chest about her controversial vetoes on bills related to workers’ rights, immigration policy, and cannabis reform.
In a lengthy interview with content creator Tevin Davis published Monday, Spanberger addressed the public anger and frustration with her vetoes of legislation that would have expanded collective bargaining rights to more public-workers in Virginia, established the state’s long-awaited retail cannabis market, and limited the activity of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement at courthouses.
“We just keep facing disappointment after disappointment, and I know that I have added to that,” Spanberger said in the interview. “And so I would say to people, I will continue to do what I believe is right, and I’m in the weeds and in the details. People can disagree, but I promise you that I am in this to try and make lives better.”
Spanberger’s comments come after her vetoes related to issues she campaigned on angered state lawmakers and advocates, some of whom said they feel betrayed by her actions. On Thursday, a large crowd of union supporters marched through downtown Richmond to protest Spanberger’s veto on collecting bargaining, chanting, “Liar liar, pants on fire!”
Kathryn Brown, president of the Waynesboro Education Association, said she canvassed for Spanberger last year from April until Election Day, and that a big reason she supported Spanberger was because of her support for collective bargaining.
“We are really, really disappointed,” Brown said at Thursday’s protest. “I would hope that she would rectify this eventually. We still really need a strong collective bargaining bill in Virginia.”
Currently, state employees are all banned from collective bargaining and local government employees can only do so where localities have passed measures allowing them to do so.
Spanberger reiterated her support for the broad policy goals of some of the bills she blocked while acknowledging the anger and disappointment over her vetoes.
“Whether it’s cannabis, protecting immigrant communities, or public-sector collective bargaining, my stances aren’t changed,” Spanberger said. “It is just a question of making sure that we are being crystal clear with how we’re moving forward.”
In the lead-up to Spanberger’s vetoes, she sent back amendments to several bills, including the collective bargaining legislation, that the Democratic-controlled General Assembly rejected.
Spanberger proposed state employees get the right to collective bargaining in 2028 and then have it expanded to all local government employees in 2030.
But state lawmakers rejected that change along with all of her other suggestions, including giving more authority to a newly created state board that unions said narrowed the scope of what workers could bargain for.
“My worries were if we have everybody go at once, then that might kind of overwhelm this new entity that we’re creating, but also, like, let’s have the state go first, and then 18 months later we’ll have localities fold in,” Spanberger said.
Spanberger said she heard from some localities that have collective bargaining about concerns how the new state law would override the local measures they passed. Others that haven’t adopted collective bargaining also shared their concerns, she added.
“I was hearing from a variety that already had [collective bargaining] and said, ‘Here’s our lessons learned, we hope this is helpful, you know, to be able to apply some of those in the amendments,’” Spanberger said.
State Del. Destiny LeVere Bolling (D-Henrico) said it was “disgusting and sad” Spanberger seemed to listen more to the concerns of those localities than the concerns of the hundreds of thousands of public workers the collective bargaining bill would have applied to.
“Anytime unions want to do anything, the local government comes out in opposition,” said LeVere Bolling, who is also the communications director for the Virginia AFL-CIO.
Democratic Virginia Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, who sponsored the collective bargaining legislation, said in his newsletter Monday that he took issue with how Spanberger went about trying to change the legislation sent to her.
He said several of Spanberger’s amendments arrived with “little prior consultation and changed the substance of bills in ways General Assembly members had not anticipated.”
“That lack of communication made it harder to reach common-sense compromises and left many of us working on these issues blindsided when final decisions were announced,” Surovell wrote.
