The 2024 General Assembly Session gaveled in this week for a “long,” 60-day session.
It will be a historic time, with the Democrats electing the first African American Speaker in the Commonwealth.
Speaker Don Scott (D-Portsmouth) taking the gavel reflects the most diverse General Assembly ever elected. Due to retirements, redistricting, and primary challenges, there are a record number of new legislators with 20 of the 40 Senators and 37 out of 100 House members having served less than a year in office.
While there are lots of new faces, we don’t expect wild changes. The Democrats control both the House and Senate by one vote, with the Republican Governor promising to veto anything he doesn’t like, so we shouldn’t see anything pass that is too extreme. We expect the focus to be on kitchen table issues, such as education, taxes, and public safety.
For this week’s update, we’re focusing on ABC issues. We expect to see other business-related bills in future updates.
As always during the Session, we are meeting weekly with the VBWA Board of Directors to review bills and receive advice on strategy to determine VBWA’s adopted positions. Legislation can be introduced until next Friday (January 19), so we’ll have more bills to report in the week ahead. Until then, listed below are highlights of those of interest introduced to date. Should you want more details, you can go directly to the bill summary, bill history and bill text by clicking the bill number.
Also, if you are a member and haven’t already signed up for our annual Legislative Conference and Day on the Hill: It’s not too late!
Tied House Exemptions
SB416 (Head): ABC modified their interpretation of some tied house regulations, which disallowed preexisting sponsorship from wholesalers and some city-owned “non-profits” in the Roanoke valley. As a result, Sen. Christopher T. Head (R-Roanoke) introduced legislation to try to fix the issue and take things back to the status quo. The VBWA Board voted to oppose the legislation.
New ABC Licensing Privileges
HB101 (Tata), HB559 (Ballard), HB1117 (Carr), HB1118 (Carr), HB1298 (Williams), SB180 (DeSteph), SB400 (Deeds): This year, we already have a number of new additions to the “Christmas tree” of performing arts facility licenses exceptions. We continue to monitor each of them individually, and anticipate at least a few more before the session is over. It seems with each passing year more and more localities want to have their facility added to the list of those granted exceptions to the mixed beverage rules.
Marijuana
There are multiple bills introduced to date impacting how the Commonwealth will move forward with cannabis sales. The VBWA is monitoring all the bills and will have more to report soon as things develop.
