Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, II spoke to the Farmville Area Chamber of Commerce at Charley’s Waterfront Café from 11:30 a.m. to 12 p.m. on Monday, April 8. In his speech, he touched upon his views on transportation, human trafficking, healthcare and higher education, as well as his goal to run for governor of Virginia once his term as attorney general ends in January 2014.
During his speech, Cuccinelli spoke on who he was, saying that he was born in New Jersey and moved to Virginia when he was two years old, was raised in Fairfax and that prior to his time as attorney general, he worked as a business owner of a small law firm whose clientele were mostly small businesses.
Cuccinelli said a mission he began as attorney general was to focus on changing the business structure within the attorney general’s office by making it more of a “merit- based system.”
He said, “We are doing more with less ... and I’ve brought a lot of what you might think of as ordinary management practices in the private sector to my role as attorney general.”
By returning money to the general funds each year, Cuccinelli stated that he’s been “erring on the side of fiscal conservativeness.”
“We always have to be mindful that the money that we’re getting comes from the private sector and the more we take out of there, the less is available to create jobs and to grow our economy,” Cuccinelli said.
Through his office, he stated that there have been further efforts on combatting gang recruitments, child pornographers and human trafficking within the state of
Virginia. Regarding the fight against human trafficking, Cuccinelli said, “We started that from scratch. It didn’t exist in the attorney general’s office until I got there.”
Concerning gang violence, Cuccinelli stated, “We’ve had prosecutions. They’ve been very successful already, and we’re expanding across the states in those efforts, but we are continuing to prosecute gangs and get them off the streets.”
Cuccinelli added that there have been more prosecutions during his two years in office than any other two-year period in the office’s history.
As for his current focused goal, Cuccinelli stated that it would be lowering the utility rates in Virginia by about $1 billion by 2025 “without shifting money from one place to another.”
With 18 months’ worth of research to understand the best method to do so, Cuccinelli said that by lowering the utility rates within the state, Virginia would become more competitive with further capability to build more business opportunities.
In a Q&A session after Cuccinelli’s speech, he was asked what his day one priority initiative as governor would be. Cuccinelli answered that it would be jobs.
When questioned about his thoughts on a transportation bill he previously supported in 2009 that was accepted this week by the General Assembly, Cuccinelli responded that he feels the bill should be looked at as a “road map.”
“One of my problems with the bill is we didn’t get to some of the fundamental causes of our transportation challenges in Virginia,” said Cuccinelli.
One of the two causes of transportationchallenges that Cuccinelli discussed included a disconnect between who is responsible for making landing decisions, transportation decisions and who has the authority to spend money. The second cause Cuccinelli discussed was that “we are one of the most centralized, decision-making systems for transportation in the whole country.”
He said, “You need any little change, you’ve got to come to Richmond to get it, and I want to decentralize that. I want to look into reducing Richmond’s power and authority into the rest of the state and let people make those decisions more locally.”
When asked his thoughts on higher education, Cuccinelli said, “I’m for it. I believe that a lot of what Governor McDonnell has been doing in the past few years is the direction we ought to be going. I think the most important thing a governor does in higher education isn’t what he does with the General Assembly; it’s the people that you pick to be on the Boards of Visitors.”
Cuccinelli added, “We have one of the best higher education systems in the whole country if you look at all our universities ... It’s got to be reachable. It’s got to be attainable. And we’ve got to put it on a sustainable, financial path.”
During his speech to the Farmville his speech to the Farmville Area Chamber of Commerce, Cuccinelli said, "What you see when I'm campaigning is what you get."
