Issues
Conservation and Preservation
Protecting our historical sites and conserving our open, green spaces has been Delegate Higgins’ top priority for decades. In addition to establishing the Bluemont Historic District, he and his wife, Gail, have personally restored two historic homes in Loudoun, receiving an award from the Loudoun Preservation Society. His family donated the EE Lake General Store to Loudoun County. During his time on the Loudoun Board of Supervisors, Delegate Higgins successfully secured funding for and established Sweet Run State Park, saved and restored what is now the John Lewis Bridge on Featherbed Lane, and worked to gain approval for the Balls Bluff Battlefield expansion. He secured emergency funding for the Waterford Foundation after the fair was cancelled due to a hurricane and funding for the stabilization of the rehabilitation of the Old Waterford Mill. He also supported Loudoun’s Historic Cemetery ordinance and initiated the study of the Loudoun County Courthouse. As Chairman of the Transportation and Land Use Committee, he began work on a Transfer of Development Rights Program to permanently preserve parcels in Western Loudoun. He also supported the Conservation Easement Assistance Program that provides financial assistance to Loudoun County landowners in placing their property under a conservation easement.
As your Delegate, Geary Higgins has been working on legislation to raise the amount of available land conservation tax credits, increase protections for historical sites from development, and keep transmission lines out of conservation easements and your back yard. Delegate Higgins led the charge to stop the creation of a new transmission right of way across Western Loudoun and is continuing to work on keeping any and all new lines within existing rights of way. Most recently, he has been diligently working to turn James Monroe’s home, Oak Hill, into a State Park despite opposition from Democrats in Richmond. Loudoun and Fauquier Counties have a rich history and make up one of the most beautiful areas in the country, embodying the American adventure and beauty that is well worth preserving. Delegate Higgins will always fight to protect and preserve our beautiful district.
Academic Excellence
COVID-19 closures and political DEI madness have set our students back years. Delegate Higgins is working hard to fix this and restore academic excellence to our Commonwealth. As your Delegate, Geary Higgins has voted for record investments into our students and teachers. As a former Loudoun School Board member and father of three daughters who attended Loudoun County Public Schools, Delegate Higgins cares deeply about improving outcomes and providing a high level of equal opportunity to every student, regardless of what they look like or the zip code in which they reside. He worked with his colleagues on the Loudoun County School Board to establish the Academies of Loudoun, a STEM 9-12 Magnet School. The Academies of Loudoun has now grown to over 2,000 students and includes the Academy of Science, the Academy of Engineering and Technology, and the Monroe Advanced Technical Academy. Geary Higgins has championed academic excellence every step of the way, and even carried a bill to expand access to virtual curricula that would allow students to get ahead outside of the classroom.
Parents’ Rights
There is a battle for the control of our children raging in our schools, and ideology-driven administrators and school board members are pushing divisive political agendas in our classrooms. Delegate Higgins believes schools need to focus on teaching academics, not left-wing politics, and that children belong to their parents, and not to the Commonwealth.
Keeping parents in the classroom and protecting their right to have a say in their children’s education will always be a top priority for the Delegate. Each year he has served, he has carried the parents’ bill of rights to clearly define and protect parents’ rights in Virginia code. Delegate Higgins carried and passed the bill to require schools to inform parents of suspected school-connected opioid overdoses within 24 hours, and he is not finished fighting for more transparency. Delegate Higgins has been one of the loudest and most consistent voices for parents in the Commonwealth.
School Safety
Every child deserves to feel safe at school so that they can focus on learning, growing, and achieving. That is why Delegate Higgins has carried more pieces of school safety legislation than any other member in his time in the House of Delegates. He supports a School Resource Officer in every school. He has worked on life-saving legislation with Max Schachter, father of the late Alex Schachter, whom we lost in the Parkland shooting. Bills that the Delegate carried include Alyssa’s Law – panic alarm buttons in every school classroom, a “see-something, say-something” app for our schools, active shooter training for armed school safety officers, and increasing the number of school resource officers. While the far-left grandstands and likes to create “gun-free” zones, Delegate Higgins is doing the real work to harden our schools and protect our kids.
Delegate Higgins believes we need to move past politics and get serious about protecting our children. We protect politicians, airports, sports arenas, courts, banks, shopping malls and yet our schools are basically left unprotected or at best with unarmed resource officers who are not prepared to defend the school in the case of an active intruder. Why are our children and teachers left defenseless to wait for the Sheriff’s department to arrive before action is taken on an active intruder? Aren’t our children and schools worth protecting?
Public Safety
Keeping our neighborhoods safe and free from crime will always be a priority for Delegate Higgins; that’s why he has been proudly endorsed by Loudoun Sheriff Mike Chapman, Fauquier Sheriff Jeremy Falls and the Police Benevolent Association. Law enforcement stands with Delegate Geary Higgins because Delegate Geary Higgins stands with law enforcement. Delegate Higgins has strongly opposed countless pro-criminal bills from the far left and will continue to advance policies that put your families’ safety first and dangerous criminals behind bars. This election is crucial because if we don’t hold this seat, the dam will break and these pro-criminal bills that will make Virginia more dangerous will flood in.
Cost of Living
Thanks to the COVID-19 and four years of disaster from the Biden Administration in Washington, Virginians are still feeling the effects of inflation on their wallets. Delegate Higgins has been working alongside Governor Youngkin to lower the cost of living for residents of the Thirtieth District by providing billions of dollars of historic tax relief and opposing reckless spending. Delegate Higgins is fighting to lower your energy bills by supporting legislation to repeal radical green new scam policies that are artificially driving up the cost of energy and penalizing ratepayers for the deficiencies of solar and wind, and the poor decisions to close down our baseload power generation options.
Business Environment
Under Governor Youngkin’s leadership, Virginia has become the top state for business. Delegate Higgins and his Republican colleagues have fought hard to maintain that status; opposing a myriad of anti-business legislation that would discourage investment and jobs in our Commonwealth. Delegate Higgins has consistently voted to create jobs, strengthen our business environment, and cut bureaucratic red tape. Delegate Higgins has helped Governor Youngkin to streamline more than 50,000 regulations in order to make it easier to do business in the Commonwealth. Another key priority of Delegate Higgins’ is supporting Virginia manufacturing and encouraging the production and sale of goods right here in Virginia. For his efforts, Delegate Higgins was named the top legislator by the Virginia Manufacturers Association.
Coherent Energy Policy
Despite a ballooning energy demand, Virginia has no plan to address that need, because we have no coherent energy policy. Our current energy production is based on leftwing politics instead of reality. This is why Delegate Higgins is working to develop energy policy that works for Virginia ratepayers, not activists or utility companies. Right now, fossil fuel power plants are being decommissioned to meet goals set by the Virginia Clean Economy Act (passed by Democrats in 2020), causing transmission lines to be built to pipe in power from out of state that is fossil-fuel-generated. While he believes clean energy is a noble goal, Delegate Higgins firmly opposes shutting down power generation before we have a viable replacement. Further, the Virginia Clean Economy Act is set to impose penalties on ratepayers when the utilities inevitably cannot meet the unachievable wind and solar goals it prescribes. Delegate Higgins believes it is time we end the wishful thinking and put the ratepayer first. Delegate Higgins is working on a plan that finally gets serious about nuclear energy, realizes we need to lean on natural gas for the time being, and allows for solar and wind to play a supplemental role where possible.
Data Centers
Delegate Higgins firmly believes that data centers do not belong next to houses or historical sites, or on conserved land. While data center revenues help to fund our schools and keep property taxes down, they do not belong everywhere, and that is why Delegate Higgins consistently voted against data centers in the wrong places when he was Catoctin Supervisor. As your Delegate, Geary Higgins is fighting for proper energy oversight at the state level to ensure we are not building ourselves into roving blackouts. He is also working to protect ratepayers from footing the bill for data centers when it comes to electric infrastructure like new transmission lines. Finally, Delegate Higgins is working to maintain local zoning control and advocating to the local governments to keep data centers away from your home and out of our beautiful viewshed in our historic House District 30.
Standing Up for Women
As a husband and father of three daughters, Delegate Higgins is a strong supporter of women and will always stand up for women. Raising his daughters, he saw firsthand how hard women work to compete both academically and athletically. The Title IX program was designed to protect women from sexual harassment and discrimination in educational and athletic competitions. The current push for allowing biological men to compete in women’s sports is undermining all the progress women have made over the years. That is why Delegate Higgins is leading the fight in Richmond to keep men out of women’s sports. He both carried the bill and successfully pushed the VHSL to finally comply with the Administration’s executive order that women’s sports are for women, period. Despite the win, this fight is not over, especially in Loudoun, and Delegate Higgins will continue to work to protect women’s sports and spaces.
Protecting Life
Delegate Higgins is pro-life and values all human life. As your Delegate, Geary Higgins has worked to save lives wherever possible. Data shows Virginians want fewer abortions and Delegate Higgins supports working to reduce the number of abortions in Virginia and finding consensus on a commonsense bill to protect life at 15 weeks, when a baby begins to feel pain, with exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother. He also strongly supports the expansion of additional services and counseling for mothers and fathers, so that there are other options besides terminating their pregnancy. In his first term, Delegate Higgins introduced legislation to encourage expecting mothers to choose life by making a portal of resources available to them. He has consistently supported legislation to protect the most vulnerable among us, the elderly, the developmentally disabled, individuals with mental illness, women in crisis, children, and the unborn.
Opioid Crisis and Mental Health
The Youngkin administration has taken great strides to curb the opioid crisis here in the Commonwealth and made significant investments in mental health. Delegate Higgins is proud to have played a part in those successes, as well as passed legislation to ensure parents are notified of school-connected opioid overdoses and outlaw pill presses in the Commonwealth. Delegate Higgins supports a continued investment in mental health and co-sponsored the bill to put a Recovery School here in Loudoun.
Improving Health
Delegate Higgins is leading the effort in Richmond to improve health in our Commonwealth. This last session, he carried a bill to pilot a program that would help us ensure whether our prescription medications were truly working for their desired purpose and passed a bill that banned seven harmful food dyes from our kids’ school meals. Serving on the Health and Human Services committee, Delegate Higgins is committed to improving health outcomes for all Virginians and is especially proud of his work to help the disability community, as well the work done to improve maternal health outcomes.
