Issue Position: Jobs

Issue Position

While we can make a ton of improvements to Route 28, the road will remain clogged every work day morning if we don't bring high-paying jobs to Prince William County, specifically in the Innovation Technology Park area of Manassas.

This area of the county is so vital to our future commercial tax base that the county's Economic Development department focuses almost entirely on developing it.

To make Innovation successful,we need to find a cost-effective way of extending the Virginia Railway Express (VRE) westward from Broad Run (near Manassas Airport) to Innovation, which will allow the county's Economic Development department officials to better market Innovation and will give commuters an alternative to driving to the area.

That's why I'm calling for a first-of-its-kind study, which I think should be conducted by Virginia Tech and funded in part by the state government, to examine best practices for rail engineering, design, construction, implementation and maintenance in Europe and Asia so we can identify inefficiencies and bring down rail costs in a safe way. For example, labor unions are much stronger in Europe than here yet our project costs are more expensive. We need to determine why that's the case with a conclusive, data-driven study and implement what we learn from it.

With mass transit running to Innovation, we'll have the ability to be more competitive in the recruiting process for defense and tech jobs that we're losing to Tysons Corner, the Research Triangle in North Carolina and so many other places.

While we work hard to bring in high-paying jobs to Innovation, we also need to take care of all our workers in Virginia. That's why I support increasing Virginia's minimum wage, which is at the federal minimum level of $7.25 for non-tipped employees.

While we may not be able to make it to $15 an hour any time soon in the General Assembly, surely we can make the case for at the very least matching West Virginia's $8.75 an hour. When our cost of living in Northern Virginia is exponentially higher than anywhere in West Virginia, there is no case to be made for why our workers should be paid less, period.

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