by Jackie Nunnery
KILMARNOCK—Candidate’s Night afforded the general electorate a rare opportunity to hear from candidates for state office.
Each candidate had two minutes to speak and they are presented in order of their appearance.
Candidates for the House of Delegate in District 99 are incumbent Republican Del. Margaret Bevans Ransone and Democrat Francis Edwards.
“I have served you in the House of Delegates and I have committed to my promises to you to stand up for family, stand up for jobs, to stand up for our businesses, and make sure I return the money back to the locality and to the schools,” said Del. Ransone. “If you go to my website, that website has not changed since I’ve been in office. My promises to you have been promises kept.
“We kept our Constitution intact and right now it is under assault. In 2017 we lost 15 members in the House of Delegates and they have an extreme agenda,” she said.
“We retired to this area about 20 years ago and in that time we’ve watched real estate values decline, the population decline and businesses decline. Nobody, because of our polarized politics, is doing anything about it,” said Edwards.
“My skill and success as a businessman was bringing all sides together. You only get results when you bring the left and the right together and discuss compromise and then you can solve problems and then you can get results. The problems that I’m talking about are health care. We need to have affordable health care for everyone and it needs to be accessible,” said Edwards.
“We also need to pay our teachers more. In Virginia, our teacher pay is 44th out of 50 states and in the Northern Neck the pay is worse than the average in Virginia.
“We also need to encourage good paying jobs in the area and that requires investing in infrastructure–roads, bridges and most importantly high-speed internet. I’ve heard talk about high-speed…