Can't Virginia lawmakers make better use of their time?

I hate to prejudge a Northern Virginia legislator I don’t know, but I have to think Delegate Mark D. Sickles, D-Fairfax, is missing the big picture.

Why else would Sickles introduce a bizarre bill last week in the General Assembly that would fine newspaper publishers $25 a day when they deliver to a residence that hasn’t requested the paper.

Sickles’ bill has a noble goal: to prevent newspapers from piling up outside homes where the occupants are away – a tipoff for potential thieves.

Anthony Kusich, Sickles’ legislative assistant, said the bill is targeted at The Washington Examiner, a free tabloid distributed to homes in the D.C. area and often accused of littering driveways and front yards. Two constituents complained to Sickles, Kusich said.

“The main thrust was that if people were out of town and get delivered these papers, they can build up over several days and thieves would know they’re not at home,” Kusich said in a phone interview.

The problem is the bill would not only apply just to an out-of-state newspaper but to all of us – creating a First Amendment slippery slope that would endanger jobs and put the newspaper industry in even more of a precarious perch.

House Bill 1104 simply states that: “The publisher of a newspaper that causes the newspaper to be delivered to the residence of another person after having been given notice by the person to cease delivery is subject to a civil penalty of $25 for each offense.” There is no explanation for the motives behind the bill.

Several troubling scenarios could arise from this, however: Let’s say one of our subscribers goes on vacation and asks that the paper be stopped for a week. But the carrier doesn’t get the memo and delivers one anyway. Under Sickles’ bill, our newspaper would have to pony up $25 for each “infraction.”

Ginger Stanley, executive director of the Virginia Press Association, said during a telephone interview last week that the bill is one of several that the state’s newspaper industry will battle. “Isn’t that a funny one,” she said between guffaws. “And who it came from shocked me. This one came out of left field.”

Legislators are limited to the number of bills they can file. Does Sickles really think an assault on a free press is legislation-worthy?

Remember, this is a commonwealth that is closing interstate rest stops and grappling with a host of transportation-related nightmares perpetuated by years of do-nothing legislators who had rather fight along party lines than fix potholes or improve public safety.

Here’s a suggestion for the Fairfax Democrat: Withdraw this bill and jump on the bandwagon led by Southwest Virginia legislators Delegate Bud Phillips and Sen. Phil Puckett.

Those Democrats, supported by the region’s Republicans, are using their legislative might to do some good for their constituents: fixing the region’s mineral rights morass.

Our region is among the state’s poorest, but our mountains straddle a billion dollars worth of annual natural gas deposits that linger in coal seams. Virginia passed a law 20 years ago creating an escrow fund to hold gas royalties for landowners who cannot be found or whose ownership is in dispute. The resulting bureaucracy has only two employees to keep score and virtually no oversight or accountability of private industry.

The upshot is that thousands of Southwest Virginia property owners are owed hundreds of thousands of dollars that has failed to reach a state-prescribed escrow account. And even the money in the account is inaccessible unless the landowners can prove in costly lawsuits they own the gas rights – a question the state Supreme Court tried to decide six years ago in favor of landowners.

Which brings up another reason Sickles’ bill is wrongheaded. The irregularities and inequality of Virginia’s natural gas royalty system was only brought to light because this newspaper spent 13 months investigating a system that our sister publication, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, opined “verges on state-sanctioned theft.”

One of our reporters drove 2,000 miles and researched tedious documents in far-flung rural courthouses, interviewed scores of experts and went to a computer-assisted-reporting boot camp in Missouri to craft an analysis that not one industry or state official has questioned. The analysis found that hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalty payments were missing from escrow, that the account had no oversight and was even losing money, and that the entire system was weighted against landowners who need the money the most.

We could not have invested that much time without a half-dozen other reporters who worked tirelessly to put out a quality daily newspaper. Those other staffers also contributed to other huge investigative projects we undertook last year, including one on the financial disclosure forms required of public officials. That investigation revealed that many officials were not filing these forms at all, or were inaccurate in their reporting.

It’s difficult enough for a newspaper our size to devote so much man- and womanpower to investigative projects. But doing it under the threat of $25-a-day penalties for delivering newspapers to the wrong houses is lunacy.

J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier and can be reached at jfoster@bristolnews.com or (276) 645-2513.