The 2022 General Assembly session adjourned “sine die” as scheduled on Saturday, March 12th, but without passing a new two-year budget. By the end of the session, the legislature considered more than 2100 bills and sent more than 800 of those to Governor Youngkin for his consideration. For most bills, the governor had until April 11th to either sign, veto, or recommend amendments for the General Assembly to consider. The legislature will now reconvene on April 27th to vote on Governor Youngkin’s 100 recommended amendments and 26 vetoes. The session included a great deal of debate over taxes, education, and adult-use cannabis, among other things. House Republicans passed several measures to roll back initiatives from the past two years, but those were defeated in the Senate. With Democrats maintaining a majority in the Senate and Republicans holding a new majority in the House, divided government required bipartisan support for any legislation to be approved.
This session, representatives from rvatech/ were involved in supporting a variety of initiatives related to the Policy Agenda as adopted last December. We were successful in passing legislation to support STEM education, increasing funding for work-based learning, investing more in workforce training programs, preserving Virginia’s status as a top state to invest in data centers, investing in the Innovation Partnership Authority’s Regional Innovation Fund, increasing tech-industry input at VITA, allocating an additional $50 million into broadband deployment, and making tremendous new investments in state and local government cybersecurity. The House budget allocates roughly $150 million in cybersecurity upgrades at the state and local levels, and the Senate proposal is very similar. These are some of the highlights from a very busy and productive legislative session, though the work is not completely finished.
The budget negotiators did not complete their work on time, and rather than extend the session the legislative leaders decided to adjourn and have the governor call them back for a special session to take up the budget when it is ready. Governor Youngkin called the special session on April 4th, but the assembly quickly recessed and will return to vote on a final budget when negotiators have completed their work. You can see the full overview of budget items that we are following by clicking here, but we have included some highlights from the budget process below:
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$50 million for broadband deployment across the state
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$30 million for GO Virginia in support of regional economic development
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$14-16 million for the Innovative Internship Fund to expand and scale support for institutions, employers and students in their work-based learning and a matching fund program to match students with employers
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$5-12.5 million for a new Office of the Chief Transformation Officer to take on government transformation initiatives and create efficiencies in agencies
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$2-3 million for the Regional Innovation Fund at the Innovation Partnership Authority
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$1.6 million for STEM teachers in middle and high schools with difficulty recruiting qualified teachers
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$1.5 million to increase the number of qualified minority computer science teachers
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$1.1 million to CodeVA for training computer science teachers across the state
A list of some of the rvatech/ supported legislation is included below, with action taken on those measures, and you can click here to view the full list of legislation that we followed during the 2022 session.
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Bill |
Sponsors |
Title |
Last Action |
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STEM Education Requires the Virginia STEM Education Advisory Board (the Board) to (i) review the occupational categories in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' standard occupational classification system to determine the occupational categories that are not properly captured in the Commonwealth's existing STEM+C workforce profile and the gaps in the Commonwealth's tracking of careers in these occupational categories for the purpose of better aligning education priorities and the Board's tracking and coordination of STEM+C and (ii) share its findings with the Virginia Economic Development Partnership Authority's Office of Education and Labor Market Alignment (the Office) to include in the Office's efforts to specifically align STEM+C workforce and education. The bill requires the Board, in conducting such a review, to focus on occupational categories such as advanced manufacturing, agriculture, financial systems, health care, military, and education careers that are not currently tracked or categorized by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics as STEM+C career fields. The bill also requires the Board to submit its findings and any recommendations to the General Assembly no later than October 1, 2022. |
Passed the General Assembly and Approved by the Governor. |
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STEM Education Adds science, technology, engineering, mathematics and computing (STEM+C), which includes real-world, interdisciplinary, and computational instruction and preparation of students in STEM+C, to the list of topics that shall be included in the Standards of Learning for the Commonwealth. The bill also directs the Virginia STEM Education Advisory Board to develop and submit to the Board of Education (i) a rubric that shall be used by the Board of Education in setting out what factors permit a school to be defined as a STEM school and (ii) recommendations for the Board to create a measurement for quality of STEM programming in general education instruction. The bill also directs the Virginia STEM Education Advisory Board to draft and report to the Department of Education proposed common language and terminology that better defines the basic literacies employed in STEM+C as methodological approaches to solving universal human challenges and, as essential, generalizable and transferable literacy toward the application of skills and content needed to solve those challenges. The bill also directs the Department of Education, based on such proposed language and terminology and no later than December 1, 2022, to recommend finalized language and terminology to the Board of Education. |
Carried over to the 2023 session in Senate Finance and Appropriations |
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ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT Provides that if data center fixtures are taxed as part of the real property where they are located, they shall be valued based on depreciated reproduction or replacement cost, rather than based on the amount of income they generate. This legislation will keep Virginia competitive at recruiting more investments in data centers. |
Passed the General Assembly and Approved by the Governor. |
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CYBERSECURITY Requires every public body to report to the Chief Information Officer (CIO) all known incidents that threaten the security of the Commonwealth's data or communications or result in exposure of data protected by federal or state laws and all other incidents compromising the security of the public body's information technology systems with the potential to cause major disruption to normal activities of the public body or other public bodies. The bill requires such reports to be made to the CIO within 24 hours from when the incident was discovered. |
Passed the General Assembly and Approved by the Governor. |
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IT PROCUREMENT Redefines the purpose and powers and duties of the Information Technology Advisory Council (the ITAC). The bill increases the membership of the ITAC from 16 to 19 members and allows for legislative members to be appointed to the ITAC. The bill also directs the Chief Information Officer of the Commonwealth to report annually to the Governor and the General Assembly regarding the work of the ITAC and any subcommittees. Finally, the bill provides that the ITAC may appoint advisory subcommittees consisting of individuals with expertise in particular subject areas and information technology to advise the ITAC on the utilization of nationally recognized technical and data standards in such subjects. |
Passed the General Assembly and Approved by the Governor. |
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ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT Provides that if data center fixtures are taxed as part of the real property where they are located, they shall be valued based on depreciated reproduction or replacement cost, rather than based on the amount of income they generate. This legislation will keep Virginia competitive at recruiting more investments in data centers. |
Passed the General Assembly and Approved by the Governor. |
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IT PROCUREMENT Redefines the purpose and powers and duties of the Information Technology Advisory Council (the ITAC). The bill increases the membership of the ITAC from 16 to 19 members and allows for legislative members to be appointed to the ITAC. The bill also directs the Chief Information Officer of the Commonwealth to report annually to the Governor and the General Assembly regarding the work of the ITAC and any subcommittees. Finally, the bill provides that the ITAC may appoint advisory subcommittees consisting of individuals with expertise in particular subject areas and information technology to advise the ITAC on the utilization of nationally recognized technical and data standards in such subjects. |
Passed the General Assembly and Approved by the Governor. |