Virginia's lax campaign finance laws have allowed corporations to embed themselves into our political process. Corporations like Dominion Energy have bought out Democrats and Republicans to the tune of millions of dollars in campaign contributions over several decades and have had undue influence on Virginia legislation as a result.

We saw the level of influence Dominion was able to have in the Virginia Clean Energy Act in the 2020 legislative session, while the bill to ban campaign contributions from Dominion (HB111 presented by Delegate Joshua Cole) remained undocketed. We should not allow this to happen again.

We saw during the 2021 session that both attempts at a wider sweeping bill to ban campaign contributions from ALL public service corporations in the Senate and the House weren't even allowed out of committee.

It is time to get big money and corporate influence out of politics and the first step we want to take is prohibiting publicly regulated utilities and other public service corporations from donating to campaigns. It is not the final step but it is the first one down a long road to establishing a legislature that represents people, and not profits.

Our requests to our Virginia General Assembly Members are as follows:

1. Refuse or continue to refuse campaign contributions from public service corporations such as energy companies like Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power and telecommunication companies like Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, among others.

2. Champion legislation to reduce the influence of Public Service Corporations in our state legislature.