Cuccinelli, McAuliffe surrogate clash on local issues: (Vote for: McAuliff, the other dude will mine us, Keep the Ban)
By Bill Sizemore
The Virginian-Pilot
VIRGINIA BEACH
On three issues of local interest in Hampton Roads – light rail, uranium mining and the public school calendar – Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and a surrogate for his opponent Terry McAuliffe staked out sharply different positions in a candidate forum Thursday.
Bruce Thompson, a local hotelier who has endorsed McAuliffe in the governor’s race, stood in for the Democrat at the lunchtime event, sponsored by the Central Business District Association. McAuliffe had a schedule conflict.
Thompson, who has backed Republican candidates in the past, said he would have supported Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling for governor if Cuccinelli hadn’t outmaneuvered Bolling for the Republican nomination. But after meeting with both candidates, he said, he was persuaded that he and McAuliffe are closely aligned on local issues.
On whether to lift Virginia’s 3-decade-old moratorium on uranium mining, Thompson said that significant safety hurdles remain, and that McAuliffe believes “those hurdles are almost insurmountable.”
The uranium issue is resonant in Hampton Roads because much of the region’s water supply comes from Lake Gaston, which lies downstream from the proposed mining site in Pittsylvania County.
Cuccinelli said he wasn’t prepared to endorse lifting the mining ban Thursday, but that, “unlike my opponent, I’m not saying never,” which he called a “closed-minded” approach.
“The technology exists today to do this safely, but there’s the question of whether it’s cost-effective or not,” he said. “The day will come, I suspect … when this will be cost-effective and there won’t be environmental risk.”
http://hamptonroads.com/2013/10/cuccinelli-mcauliffe-surrogate-clash-local-issues-beach
Great comments:
"do our homework"
Submitted by DC on Fri, 10/11/2013 at 3:45 pm.
Attack ads (by both sides) are not very enlightening. McAuliffe and Cuccinelli differ substantially on all the issues that will directly affect all of us, including expanding Medicaid, keeping our air and water clean, keeping the ban on uranium mining, investing in public education and transportation, equal rights for gays, and allowing women to make their own healthcare decisions without government interference. "Yes, we each have our own core values, and if they align with a candidate, vote that way."
