The Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill Tuesday that’s a key step toward the Capitals and Wizards leaving DC for a proposed new arena in Alexandria. But where the project goes from here is a question of how much Democrats, who control the Commonwealth’s legislature, can extract from Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who champions the plan.
“The odds of success right now are bleak, well under 50/50,” University of Mary Washington political science professor and longtime Virginia General Assembly watcher Stephen Farnsworth tells Washingtonian in an e-mail. “A deal often can be had across partisan lines, but the cost for the governor of securing the support of Democratic legislative majorities has just gone up.”
That’s in part because of Youngkin’s recent appearance alongside Donald Trump Jr. this past week at Washington and Lee College — in which the two teed off on President Biden. Youngkin claimed that Democrats “are content to concede, to compromise away, to abandon the very foundations that have made America exceptional.”
On Monday, Virginia Senator Louise Lucas, who chairs the body’s Finance and Appropriations Committee, said she considered the proposal a goner following Youngkin’s remarks. “The governor is going to have to make special efforts to woo Virginia Democrats given his partisan comments over the weekend,” Farnsworth tells us.
One potential avenue for negotiations could be how the project would get funded. Virginia Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, a Democrat who represents parts of Northern Virginia (albeit not Alexandria), told Axios on Monday that his side would consider “continued conversations,” adding that Senate Democrats had “asked if there could be a way the project could be financed differently,” to no avail.
Democrats could also seek concessions from Youngkin on rolling out recreational cannabis sales or raising the state’s minimum wage in exchange for support on the stadium deal, the Associated Press reports. Virginia Senator Adam Ebbin, who represents the district where the arena would be constructed — and has tussled with Youngkin in the past — told constituents in an email Tuesday that he would need to see investment in affordable housing, a commitment to Metro funding, and “meaningful and binding agreements to create good-paying jobs, in construction, service and hospitality” before he commits to a vote.
Tuesday’s vote moves the House bill to the Senate—provided the chamber actually decides to take it up, which is unlikely given the current state of negotiations, Farnsworth writes. He thinks it’s more likely that the issue will get revived during budgeting negotiations toward the end of the current legislative session.
But the bottom line, he writes, is that it’s going to take a fair amount of concessions from Youngkin to get the Wizards and Capitals across the Potomac.
“Democratic legislators don’t want this stadium deal nearly as much as Youngkin does, and so I would expect this to fail unless the governor more or less gives away the store on Democratic budget preferences,” Farnsworth wrote.
