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Lieutenant governor hopeful visits area
Lingamfelter
Thursday, August 23, 2012
By PAUL COLLINS - Bulletin Staff Writer
Republican lieutenant governor hopeful L. Scott Lingamfelter said Wednesday as a state delegate considering thousands of bills each year, he asks himself: Is it constitutional? Is it good or bad for families? Is it good or bad for small businesses?
Lingamfelter said he would take that same approach as lieutenant governor, and as he travels the commonwealth, many individuals, families and business people are telling him that’s the right approach.
Scott, 61, a retired Army colonel who lives in Prince William County, is seeking the Republican nomination to run for lieutenant governor in 2013.
He said Wednesday the founding fathers tried to establish a “servant-sovereign relationship,” in which citizens are sovereign and elected leaders are servants. But the post-modern world has turned that “inside out.”
The question “Is it constitutional?” is fundamental, he said. “If something is outside the Constitution, stop.”
As for the question “Is it good or bad for families?” he said that families are a building block of this country. Families have fallen apart, and society has suffered, he said.
On the question, Is it good or bad for small businesses? Lingamfelter said 80 percent of what’s going well in the economy is rooted in small businesses.
Small businesses need reduced governmental regulations, low taxes and freedom of opportunity to perform what they do best: Create jobs, he said.
He added that Virginia would be in better shape if more leaders would ask themselves those three questions.
A news release from his campaign says Lingamfelter was elected to the House of Delegates in 2001, representing Prince William and Fauquier counties.
He is a member of the House Appropriations Committee, subcommittee chairman of the Capital Outlay Committee of Appropriations, a member of the Education Committee and chairman of the Militia, Police and Public Safety Committee, the release says. He serves on the Chesapeake Bay Commission and is the co-chairman of the Legislative Sportsmen’s Caucus.
Lingamfelter said Wednesday that as a legislator he for years advocated programmatic audits of state government by “outside eyes,” but he often met with resistance. He said such audits look for such things as duplication of effort, waste, fraud, abuse and to redirect money to better use in core services of education, transportation and public safety.
He said in 2008 he asked Bob McDonnell, who was contemplating running for governor, to include programmatic audits in his platform. McDonnell did, and as governor “came to me and others to put programmatic audits into law,” Lingamfelter said.
According to Lingamfelter and a Nov. 9, 2010, release from the governor’s office, an independent performance audit of the Virginia Department of Transportation identified more than $1.45 billion to be used to fund transportation projects.
Lingamfelter said he wants more such audits of state government departments to be done.
He said there should be more synchronization between state and local economic development efforts. And efforts need to be increased to entice manufacturers back to Virginia.
According to Lingamfelter and a campaign news release, he was raised in Richmond, graduated from Virginia Military Institute with a bachelor’s degree in history, earned a master’s degree in government and foreign affairs from the University of Virginia while in the Army and retired from Army after 28 years of active-duty service.
After retiring, he worked eight years in the private sector focused on strategic planning in support of the senior leadership for the U.S. Missile Defense Agency and in the emergency management and homeland security arena in support of federal agencies, states and localities.
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