Opinion

Progressive Voice is a weekly opinion column. The views and opinions expressed in the column are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of their organizations or ARLnow.com.

Labor Day is the traditional start of campaigns in Arlington, and the time between now and Election Day will be full of candidate debates, forums, joint appearances and neighborhood events.

Arlington County is attractive to many because of its history of smart growth, walkable urbanism, a population with the highest levels of educational attainment, and an unemployment rate half the size of the nation’s average.

At the same time, however, Arlington can be a transient location for millennials, young couples looking to start a family and families headed by single women, due to steep housing prices and other high costs of living.

I believe 2015 will be a year in which issues that resonate particularly with women will be an important feature of the campaign season. These issues involve some of the greatest opportunities to improve the welfare, quality of life and advancement of Arlingtonians.

We all need to work together to ensure a safe community. A recent series of attempted sexual assaults in Arlington show us we cannot take safety for granted. The three different failed attempts reported by Arlington County Police Department in July have made many women in Arlington, like myself, reconsider our everyday decisions about how to most wisely travel from location to location.

In addition to greater mindfulness about risks and supporting the efforts by law enforcement officials and officers on the street to deter assaults and apprehend those who have committed assaults, we should address gaps in justice for survivors of sexual violence.

One important priority is ensuring the availability in Arlington of SAFE kits and SANE programs, and reducing backlogs in the processing of rape kits.

Another priority is supporting and monitoring the County’s work with nonprofit organizations to extend the County’s 24-hour domestic violence hotline services to sexual violence hotline and companion services. We also need to ensure sufficient staffing of our Violence Intervention Program.

Quality of life for women and families in Arlington is about more than safe communities.

Economic opportunity for women often depends on access to affordable and stable housing options, quality schools and lifelong learning opportunities for their children and themselves, and sensible child care options.

Housing stability is a key consideration for women and men of all ages in Arlington. Rising rents and home prices create concerns that people will be forced out of their communities. Our economic vibrancy, and our capacity to attract business and employers, depends on the continued economic and generational diversity of our residents.

Renters, young people and older residents seeking to “age in place” share common cause in preventing displacement and ensuring that we continue to proactively and innovatively address the issue of housing affordability and the continued presence of affordable units.

While child care in Arlington sets the quality standard in Virginia, our young families are bearing the burden of very high costs for that care. These costs often drive young families, and single mothers in particular, from our community.

Arlington childcare costs, like much of Northern Virginia, are a quarter to a third higher than in the rest of the Commonwealth. This issue is a result of a supply gap. Without sacrificing quality, we can find ways to reduce costs and address the child care supply gap by pursuing flexibilities in zoning to attract new child care centers.

Finally, Arlington should continue to pursue progressive values that help make it such an attractive place to live and a model community in many respects. For that reason, we should continue to build on our emerging collaboration with statewide reproductive choice advocates to ensure our zoning practices are friendly to the location of women’s health centers closest to our community.

We have much to be proud of and much to accomplish in Arlington. We can continue to address important priorities for women in ways that are innovative, cost effective, and both family-friendly and taxpayer-friendly.

I look forward to hearing more from our candidates on these important issues.

Michelle Woods is the Women’s Caucus Chair of the Arlington Young Democrats.

Progressive Voice is a weekly opinion column. The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the individual author and do not necessarily reflect the views of their organization or ARLnow.com.

Over the past two weeks, many Arlington families have taken their daughters and sons to college for the start of the fall semester. As the home to university campuses and education centers affiliated with colleges and universities, Arlington also welcomed many students arriving for the new school year.

Arlington’s public schools have demonstrated over the years that they provide excellent preparation for success at colleges and universities in Virginia and across the country.

Yet success in the classroom is not the only important component of a successful college education. We have seen ever stronger evidence of the prevalence of unwanted sexual advances on college campuses. We are gaining greater knowledge of the impact of binge drinking. And we are making advances in identifying and working with students suffering from depression.

Fortunately, very few parents will ever experience losing a loved one on a college campus.

However, in one of the darkest days in the history of our Commonwealth, 32 families lost loved ones at the hands of a mentally disturbed gunman. More than two dozen others were wounded or seriously injured that day in April 2007 in Blacksburg. Many of the victims and survivors were from Northern Virginia.

The loss felt by the victim’s families and the impact on the survivors was profound.

Despite their losses, however, the families were determined to make a positive and lasting tribute to the 32 who were killed — through programs designed to help colleges and universities be safer and more secure.

As Counselor to the Governor, I worked closely with many of the families in developing a comprehensive settlement of their potential claims against Virginia Tech and the Commonwealth of Virginia. Part of that settlement was the establishment of a VTV Family Outreach Foundation.

In that effort, I came to admire the families for their desire to honor their loved ones through insuring that survivors received the health care they needed to recover from their injuries, through applying lessons learned in how to work effectively with grieving families, and by joining together to uncover all of the dimensions of campus security.

Over the past several years, the VTV Family Foundation has laid the groundwork for a new integrated approach to improving campus safety.

In August, the 32 National Campus Safety Initiative was unveiled in a moving launch event at George Mason University’s Center for the Arts. We heard from a family member of a student victim, a student who survived three bullet wounds, law enforcement personnel, national leaders in school safety, and deans of students at participating universities that include George Mason and the University of Florida.

The Initiative creates a forum where national experts can develop best practices and resources with the guidance of survivors and victims’ families.

To improve campus security in a positive, proactive way, the 32 NCSI also provides a free, confidential, self-paced program of that provides colleges and universities with a new resource to better assess themselves in areas such as alcohol and drug use, campus public safety, emergency management, hazing, mental health, missing students, physical security, sexual violence, and threat assessment.

The determination of the VTV Family Outreach Foundation to prevent another tragedy of the magnitude of the one that took place in April 2007 is a testament to the human spirit and the determination of good women and men to selflessly help students and their parents feel a greater sense of security.

The Foundation will need additional private and public support to expand its mission. I encourage parents of college students and Arlingtonians generally to learn more at www.vtvfamilyfoundation.org or www.32NCSI.org.

Larry Roberts is an attorney in private practice. A resident of Arlington for over 30 years, he also spent four years in Richmond as Counselor to Governor Tim Kaine. As Counselor, he was tasked with leading the Commonwealth’s ongoing response to the tragedy at Virginia Tech.

Progressive Voice is a weekly opinion column. The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the individual author and do not necessarily reflect the views of their organization or ARLnow.com.

Arlington’s progressive voters played a significant role in electing Democrats to all five of the Commonwealth’s statewide offices – U.S. Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, Governor Terry McAuliffe, Lt. Governor Ralph Northam, and Attorney General Mark Herring. All five won highly competitive races that reflect Virginia’s highly competitive political environment. Arlington’s vote margins mattered.

Yet progressive policies favored by a large majority of Arlington voters, set forth in Arlington County’s legislative agenda and advanced by Arlington’s representatives in the General Assembly and in Congress are very often opposed and killed by strong Republican majorities that do not reflect the composition of Virginia voters or the overall partisan breakdown of national votes for House of Representatives candidates.

These majorities do not reflect the values or competitive nature of Virginia’s electorate, but result from Republican redistricting decisions in the General Assembly in Richmond — packing Democratic voters into districts in Northern Virginia and in majority-minority districts in order to create many more safe Republican districts.

The impact on Arlington from this district packing is that political priorities for Arlington requiring legislative approval – and they are many – face a steep uphill battle in a House of Delegates that has a 67-32 Republican majority.

Packing of Democratic voters into strongly Democratic districts dilutes the political strength that Arlington shows in statewide races.

Recently, a federal court ruled that Virginia’s Congressional districts were drawn improperly (with a similar suit pending that challenges the Delegate districts drawn by Republicans in the House of Delegates).

Governor McAuliffe called the General Assembly into special session to fix the problem with Republican gerrymandering of Congressional seats, but the General Assembly took no action.

How did that happen? Why did it happen? What can Arlingtonians do about it?

During the recent special session, Republican legislators in Richmond turned their backs on Arlingtonians and fellow Northern Virginians who bear the brunt of irresponsible gerrymandering that has gone on -by both parties over the years — for too long.

One example occurred in the House Privileges and Elections Committee.

“We’re no longer in session, so we can no longer take your testimony.”

With these words, Committee Chairman, Mark Cole (R-Spotsylvania) interrupted the testimony of a woman’s rights leader and essentially sent home the 19 scheduled speakers at a critical public hearing on how to respond to the federal court order that Virginia fix the Republican-created districts.

Indeed, Republican legislators who control the General Assembly did not even introduce a new map for consideration. With these and other actions and inactions, the Republican legislators failed to meet a unique opportunity for their party to show the world that it stood for strengthening freedom and democracy, and not for undermining the right to vote of many Virginians.

My brother and I were raised by a single mother in South America. My caring, resilient and talented mother made something clear from the get go: if you break something, you take responsibility for it and you go out of your way to fix it. The House Republicans certainly failed my mother’s test.

The key reason why nothing happened is that legislators like the notion of legislators choosing their constituents rather than constituents choosing their political leaders through a fair and equitable redistricting process.

Indeed, “Virginia is ranked as one of the most gerrymandered states in the country both on the congressional and state levels based on lack of compactness and contiguity of its districts,” according to OneVirginia 2021, a Richmond-based multi-partisan organization advocating for fair redistricting in the Commonwealth. Throughout the Commonwealth, counties and cities are being broken up in half or into multiple pieces to create heavily partisan districts.”

What can Arlingtonians do about the need for fair redistricting? An important first step is supporting the efforts of OneVirginia 2021.

Another step is to be vigilant about what happens in the General Assembly and voice your concerns to legislators across the state.

The bottom line: our constitutional right to vote is sacred – it’s our voice. People should pick their political leaders, NOT the other way around. A GOP truly committed to freedom and democracy would support nonpartisan redistricting, which is gradually taking hold in several states and should become the law nationwide. Electoral districts should be compact, contiguous, and grounded on the principles of equal representation. Nonpartisan redistricting should be a moral imperative for all of us and we should demand it from our leaders now.

Federico E. Cura is a strategic communication trainer, outreach specialist and grassroots organizer. He spent years as a K-12 educator teaching Spanish and ESOL, and served on the Arlington County Transportation Commission.