Sen. Mark Warner talked about affordable housing, healthcare and artificial intelligence with local residents during a tour through the Shenandoah Valley and Central Virginia last week. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi and Omega Ilijevich teamed up to cover the trip and filed this report.
Sen. Warner met with service agency heads and city leaders in Harrisonburg on Friday afternoon, and presented a $2 million check to the Harrisonburg Redevelopment and Housing Authority. The Congressionally Directed Spending funds will go towards renovating the 60-unit Lineweaver Annex apartment building, which houses low-income elderly and disabled residents. This is part of a larger initiative which includes building out affordable housing units in the historic Glen's Fair Price store nearby.
HRHA's executive director, Michael Wong, said the total cost of both projects is around $22 million – which is inflated by tariffs and the Build America, Buy America Act.
Warner praised the recently passed "21st Century ROAD to Housing Act," which combines several pieces of legislation meant to improve access to rental housing and home ownership. The Senate voted on this multiple times between amendments – each time racking up 82 to 90 yays.
MARK WARNER: You can't get 88 senators, where I work, to agree the sun rises in the East! [laughter]
The law includes the RESIDE Act, which creates a pilot grant program for local governments to build affordable housing in vacant commercial and industrial buildings.
Nonprofit leaders, such as Candy Phillips from First Step: A Response to Domestic Violence, talked about their increasing hurdles.
CANDY PHILLIPS: We used to have a lot of local landlords that we could work with, that would really work with us. They'd bypass the credit checks, they'd bypass some other things, knowing that we were working with these survivors. And so many of our apartments, locally, have gone to property management companies.
After the event, WMRA caught up with the senator on a few other issues, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in light of recent operations in Luray and Ruckersville, and fatal shootings at the hands of ICE agents in Maine and Texas.
WARNER: I would love to put more guardrails on ICE. I'm amazed that these ICE agents still don't have body cameras. … Let me be the first to acknowledge, Joe Biden screwed up the border. … But that doesn't mean we should put a whole lot of masked ICE agents out there able to pick up people dropping off kids at the daycare or picking up people going to work. And in a place like the valley, where you have relied, whether it's agriculture or poultry, so long on immigrant labor, this ends up hurting the overall economy. … We keep throwing out people that have not committed any other crime other than coming here undocumented. And I think that's wrong.
As WMRA and other news outlets have reported, the vast majority of immigrants detained in the commonwealth have not been convicted of a crime. Warner noted that, following the recent shootings, ICE planned to pause traffic stops, but the White House pushed back.
WARNER: You see the president himself reversed that. He's obsessed about kicking people out of this country.
He also said the bill that would create the Shenandoah Mountain National Scenic Area, which Warner and Sen. Tim Kaine introduced in 2022 and again last year, is being rolled into broader public lands legislation that probably won't move forward this year.
Later Friday afternoon in Staunton, about 100 people braved 90-degree temperatures to attend a meet-and-greet event at Redbeard Brewing Company, as covered by WMRA's Omega Ilijevich.
WARNER: What a great turnout! I can remember Staunton events that could fit in that booth.
The senator will face off against one of three Republican primary candidates in a November general election. Now serving his third congressional term, Warner announced that his upcoming re-election bid would be his last.
WARNER: It is time to kinda pack up and move on and bring on a lot more young people.
Fresh from a heated CBS news appearance responding to President Donald Trump's unsupported claims of vulnerabilities in election infrastructure, the former governor focused his fiery campaign speech on national issues, including election security and the war in Iran.
One of his major political goals garnered approving roars from the crowd.
WARNER: It is time for America to have universal health care.
Senator Warner was not always a proponent of a universal system. While describing his change of heart on the issue, he cited recent closures of local clinics as part of a larger problem.
WARNER: We can't have a system where people who tell the truth, for example, at Augusta Health, when they have to shut down rural health clinics because of these future cuts, are kind of held in contempt. We’ve got to start with universal health care because that's the only way we can focus on what we really need to do, bringing down costs.
Closing the speech, the senator turned to another campaign tenet: artificial intelligence. Warner, who was a tech entrepreneur before starting his political career, proposed various legislative responses to the rapid expansion of AI, including a national standard for data center construction.
WARNER: They don't have to connect to the grid. They can bring the power. They need power of their own. They need water, and cannot take your water use. They need to be set back from communities.
When asked about growing calls for a moratorium on data centers, Warner pushed back on the idea. He proposed withholding tax incentives from tech companies as an alternative bargaining chip.
With over 660 active facilities and more on the way, Virginia has more data centers than any other state. In March, the Augusta County Board of Supervisors approved funds for a multi-county study to identify potential data center locations.
