Catching up with Sen. Kaine: ‘Chesterfield’s an innovator’
Amid swirling controversy over Amazon.com’s corporate culture, U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine stopped by the company’s distribution facility in Chesterfield last week. The walk-through, scheduled before The New York Times published a scathing story on the Web retailer’s bruising management style, was part of Kaine’s recent five-day economic tour across the state.
With a résumé that includes being the former governor of Virginia, former chair of the Democratic National Committee and former mayor of Richmond, we asked our state’s junior senator to weigh in on Chesterfield, the presidential election and the Confederate flag controversy.
As for Amazon.com, he said he was pleased to see the company respond quickly to the recent controversy. “The New York Times piece presented tough allegations about Amazon’s corporate culture and employee mistreatment,” he said in a statement. “I was glad to see the company’s leadership came out quickly to say such a lack of empathy will not be tolerated.”
Chesterfield Observer: Hello, Senator. What brings you out to Chesterfield?
Sen. Tim Kaine: Doing a week of economic development visits, and I’ve really wanted to come and see [the Amazon.com center]. This is very innovative, 1.2 million square feet, thousands of employees, sizeable, innovative company, innovative operation, and I played a little bit of a part on the front end when I was governor on theMeadowville interchange.
Aside from jobs, what else does Amazon bring to Chesterfield?
You know, Jay Stegmaier – the county administrator – mentioned something to me that I thought was pretty important. When Amazon did this building it was a nine-month build. … In a lot of counties, they slow you up so much with permits and things like that, that you can’t do a project like that.
If Amazon is an innovator and they choose Chesterfield, frankly some of that reputation goes over to Chesterfield. Chesterfield’s an innovator too. And the way this project was managed helps Chesterfield make that case.
Turning to national politics, what do you think the Democratic nominee [for president] will have to do to win the election?
I don’t know any state’s politics like I know Virginia’s, and [whatever] a person has to do to win Virginia, that person will win the national race. We are now a really good bellwether state, and Virginians are practical. We may be Democrats, Republicans or independents, but we don’t register by party in Virginia, so we tend to be real pragmatic. Tell us what your vision is and how you can accomplish it.
I think they’re going to want to hear from the candidate, “Here’s my experience, but more than the past, here’s what I want to do and here’s how I’m gonna do it.”
I’m a strong supporter of [Hillary] Clinton. I think she’s so well-prepared on both domestic and foreign policy issues she’ll be able to lead the country for the next number of years, and I think she’s got a real good chance of winning Virginia.
Donald Trump has been getting a lot of traction lately as a candidate, and much of his campaign so far has revolved around immigration reform. What do you think should be done as far as immigration in this country?
The Senate passed a comprehensive immigration reform bill two years ago. We’ve been waiting for the House to act, and the House hasn’t even put a bill out of committee, much less debated one on the floor. There is a need for comprehensive reform of the nation’s immigration laws; the last one was done in 1986.
The Confederate flag has been in the news a lot lately, and when you were mayor there was the …
Oh, we had plenty of them. We had the [Robert E.] Lee mural, we had the renaming of the two bridges from Civil War to civil rights heroes, the Arthur Ashe statue. We had a lot of those when I was in local office.
I was hoping you could weigh in on the flag controversy and Gov. McAuliffe’s decision to ban the Confederate flag from state license plates.
You can’t use the battle flag in an official capacity in a way that doesn’t offend people, and I very much supported what the governor did.
The way I tried to do it when I was mayor is we didn’t wholesale change in the city, but when we had the opportunity to do new things – new bridges, new statues, new infrastructure – to the extent that parts of our history haven’t been told, let’s tell our full story and our full history.
But we didn’t change everything. The street names – Stuart Circle and things like that – we kept them, but the flag is a different matter. The battle flag really wasn’t used much in the south after the Civil War until the 1960s when it was kind of reintroduced to suggest opposition to Brown v. Board and integration and things like that, so it carries a very painful message. I think what the governor did on that was right.
