Boucher looks back on 28 years in Congress

ABINGDON, Va. – Now that his 28 years in Congress have come to a close, former U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher will be remembered as a builder, say those who’ve known him through the years, a region-builder and an advocate for the people in his rural Appalachian district.

“He will definitely be recognized as someone who dedicated a long period of service to trying to make Southwest Virginia competitive in the 21st century,” said U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., who has worked with Boucher from across the aisle in Congress.

“He was, I think, instrumental in helping Southwest Virginia to be more competitive and … to encourage the idea that you no longer have to live inside the beltway or on Wall Street to have some of the high-paying jobs that utilize new technology to communicate with the rest of the world.”

When Boucher was first elected to represent Virginia’s 9th Congressional District – the state’s far Southwest corner – in 1982, parts of the relatively poor region were still heavily damaged from a big flood in 1977.

The population was in rapid decline and few people had access to pubic water, let alone any kind of high-tech infrastructure or program to diversify the economy. Boucher is credited, through steady work over the years, with substantially improving life for residents of far Southwest Virginia.

Importance of water

Virginia Sen. Phillip Puckett, D-Lebanon, has known Boucher for decades, ever since serving as a delegate to the convention that nominated Boucher to run for Congress the first time. Puckett said water infrastructure is an important example of the work Boucher has done as a congressman.

Little by little, Puckett said, Boucher helped to acquire the funding that extended water lines into Southwest Virginia’s rural counties. It’s been particularly important in the coalfield counties, Puckett said, where disturbance of the ground for mining and gas drilling has long resulted in water problems for residents.

“Every time we have water projects or wastewater plans or things like that, the congressman has always brought money to complete those projects,” Puckett said. “Most of those projects had state money and local money in it, and the congressman always finished the deal.”

He said that infrastructure has been important not only for quality of life, but for helping breed regional cooperation that’s become helpful in other endeavors since.

“Infrastructure’s one of the first things that allows you to have growth,” Puckett said. “He brought people together to start with to give them sort of a vision on what he thought might be there, but he also brought money.”

Puckett said water infrastructure also became an element in another regional effort that Boucher helped to get started: industrial parks. He estimates that perhaps 100 new industries came to the district as a direct result of Boucher’s leadership on economic development.

He also made an impact on a local level, Puckett said, like the slow-moving effort to flood-proof and revive Grundy, the seat of Buchanan County, after a historic flood devastated its downtown in 1977.

After years of unofficial talks and more than a decade of construction work since an innovative deal was struck to combine a state road-building plan with the federal flood-proofing effort, the town is preparing to cut the ribbon on its new downtown.

“He helped get the funding, and he helped continue the funding for the completion of the project,” said Roger Powers, the town manager.

“We feel it’s going to have a tremendous impact. Grundy will be once again a shopping center not only for Buchanan County but for surrounding counties, as it was many years go.”

The centerpiece of the new downtown, built on a 13-acre development site blasted out of the side of a mountain, is a two-story parking deck with a Walmart store on top.

“He’s the sole reason that happened,” Puckett said of Boucher and the project, which took $100 million in federal money and at least as much from state and local sources. “Without him, it would not have happened.”

Powers said Boucher also brought money for other needed projects in the surrounding area, including construction of a regional airport.

Puckett said Boucher has been instrumental in developing the now-under-construction Coalfield Expressway, a four-lane east-west highway being built with the help of mining companies, which already have the equipment needed to move mountains out of the way.

Boucher also helped over the years with another industry that seems poised for take off in Southwest Virginia: tourism.

“He was a guy that didn’t let too much grass grow under his feet,” Puckett said of Boucher’s years in Congress. “He was always looking for things to help improve the quality of life of the people he served.”

Envisioning the future

A decade-old headline in the Los Angeles Times applauds Boucher for a feat that’s had not only regional, but national impact.

“He created the Net – Really,” reads the header to a story that put the small-town Democrat in the national spotlight.

“Congressman Rick Boucher is a politician who can truly claim to be a creator of the modern Internet,” the March 1, 2001, Times article begins.

“He wrote the 1992 law that transformed what was then called the NSFnet, overseen by the National Science Foundation, from a government entity that could handle commercial traffic,” according to the article. “The congressional subcommittee he chaired then oversaw the transfer of control of the Internet from the NSF, which had allowed only scientific and educational materials on the Net, to the private sector.”

In the years since, Boucher has spearheaded efforts to wire rural Southwest Virginia with high-speed broadband Internet. Puckett and others in the region credit that vision with the development of a host of high-tech industries in the region.

The poster children for that project are Northrop Grumman and CGI, two technology-based firms that now employ hundreds of people in Lebanon, the seat of Russell County and a town of about 3,200 residents.

The town is situated on a key line of Internet infrastructure, which now has exit ramps all over Southwest Virginia.

Now, call centers and other technology-based companies around the region make use of the Internet access, with state money being used to build energy research centers in hopes of growing Southwest Virginia’s high-tech economy.

During his final term in office, Boucher rolled out another technology: solar- and wind-powered equipment atop old fire towers to beam a wireless Internet signal to homes in even the most isolated hills and hollows.

“From the very beginning, Congressman Boucher was one of the authors of the telecom act that allowed us to bring affordable broadband and other telecommunications services to rural areas of Virginia and across the nation,” said Dr. Karen Rheuban, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Telehealth. “He has been an ardent champion to bring that infrastructure to underserved and rural areas to match what has traditionally been available only in our urban areas."  

In so doing, Rheuban said, Boucher has also helped Southwest Virginia make great strides in terms of health care access.

Her field of telemedicine uses high-speed Internet connections to transfer medical information and allows doctors to see their patients using advanced technologies, without requiring patients and their families to travel long distances for access to specialty care.

She said UVa. connects to 38 sites across Southwest Virginia to provide telemedicine services, which has saved Southwest Virginia residents more than 6 million miles of highway travel.

“[Boucher] He’s played a leadership role on the federal level, on the state level and regionally to advance telemedicine,” Rheuban said.

“From expanding the broadband infrastructure, the information super-highway over which these consultations and programs operate, to the procurement of equipment and the provision of services, and subsequently to help foster sound federal policies that advance telemedicine towards becoming mainstream health care, Rick has played a national leadership role.”

Many of the programs he has helped to pioneer in Southwest Virginia have become a model for the rest of the country, she said.

 “It’s about state and federal partnership and people with a vision to get things done,” she said, “and that’s Mr. Boucher.”

Advocate for the people

James Gibbs, an international vice president-at-large for the United Mine Workers of America, saw many years of Boucher’s work in the coalfields.

A Dickenson County native, he recalls times when Boucher helped both the union and the companies, for the sake of supporting jobs in Southwest Virginia.

Beyond that, he said, Boucher and his staff personally helped people navigate the difficult federal bureaucracy, whether they were coal miners seeking black lung benefits or others who had trouble getting Social Security benefits.

“Rick Boucher’s office and his staff stepped up to the plate and made sure that people got headed in the right direction with lawyers and with the legal work that they needed done and making sure they had met the right people,” Gibbs said.

“He always personalized a lot of things for a lot of individuals. He didn’t just know that there was a group of people in Dickenson County. … He got out and he always met the people.”

In the end, Gibbs said, that’s how Boucher will be remembered in the coalfield counties, for the way he impacted his constituents on an individual level.

State Sen. William Wampler, R-Bristol, whose father, William Wampler Sr., lost his 9th District Congressional seat to Boucher, also pointed to Boucher’s intense personal service as a key part of his legacy.

“He was able to build a staff that handled thousands and thousands of constituent inquiries and … worked very hard to help address the citizen concerns as it related to the federal government,” Wampler said. “Thirty years from now, people will remember that and still talk about it.”

There’s one area in which Boucher has gotten a poor rating with regard to the people: Citizens Against Government Waste, a taxpayer watchdog group, ranks him as “hostile” to the taxpayers’ interest when it comes to pork-barrel spending.

In 2009, the group gave him a rating of 1 percent out of a possible 100, with a 13 percent lifetime rating.

It has six rating groups: “hostile” for 0-19 percent, “unfriendly” for 20-39 percent, “lukewarm” for 40-59 percent, “friendly” for 60-79 percent, “taxpayer hero” for 80-99 percent and “taxpayer super hero” for 100 percent.

According to the organization, “A ‘pork’ project is a line-item in an appropriations bill that designates tax dollars for a specific purpose in circumvention of established budgetary procedures.”

In common parlance, it’s another word for an earmark, the kind of federal project that’s tacked onto an unrelated bill, often to win the vote of a particular congressman on a piece of legislation.

Boucher, facing recent criticism with the ascendance of the earmark issue in national politics, has stood up for his projects, explaining that they’re not giveaways. Rather, he has said, they’ve been long-term investments in Southwest Virginia’s future.

They’ve also been the kind of little-by-little investments over the years that have won him praise from leaders all over the 9th District, who’ve used the strategically placed money to help bridge the gap into the 21st century.

“I would say 30 years from now when people reflect on Congressman Boucher’s service, they will say just what the congressman said on Election Night: It was a labor of love,” Wampler said. “He totally committed himself to his work in the United States House of Representatives.”

dmccown@bristolnews.com
(276) 791-0701

1946 – Frederick Carlyle “Rick” Boucher is born in Washington County, Va.

1964 – Graduates from Abingdon High School

1968 – Receives a bachelor’s degree from Roanoke College

1971 – Receives a law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law

1974 – Elected to the Virginia state senate

1983 – Elected to Congress, defeating longtime Republican incumbent William Wampler Sr.

2006 – Marries Amy Hauslohner on the Virginia Creeper Trail

2008 – Wins his 13th term in Congress, running unopposed and winning 97 percent of the vote

2010 – Loses his seat in Congress to Republican Morgan Griffith