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FORMER HOUSE AGRICULTURE CHAIRMAN VAN YAHRES DIES
By Bob Lewis
The Associated Press
8Feb08 Mitchell Van Yahres, known during his 24 years in the House of Delegates as a dauntless advocate for the powerless and poor, died today. He was 81. Mr. Van Yahres died around 6 p.m. of unexpected complications from cancer surgery on Tuesday, said Del. David Toscano, D-Charlottesville.
In 2005, Toscano won the 57th District seat that Mr. Van Yahres had held until his retirement.
Mr. Van Yahres, an arborist who moved to Charlottesville from New York in 1949 to build his family's tree business, was the city's mayor in the 1970s. While in that office, Mr. Van Yahres ordered a shanty relocated from a slum into a trendy shopping center to show the affluent the conditions of the poor.
His idealism continued after he reached the General Assembly in 1982, where his progressive measures often died, particularly after his fellow Democrats lost control of the House to the Republicans in 2000. That cost him his Agriculture Committee chairmanship.
From 1995 until his retirement, Mr. Van Yahres was chief sponsor of 123 bills. Fifty-two percent passed through 1999, but only 26 percent passed after the GOP took over. In the last of his 12 terms, he offered bills to add a 60 cent-per-pack tax to cigarettes to fund Medicaid and to repeal a state ban on civil unions between same sex partners. Neither ever reached the House floor.
Perhaps his most symbolic legislation came in 2004. House Joint Resolution 112 urged General Assembly members to go on a "welfare diet." It called on lawmakers to limit their food budget for two weeks to "the same amount of money that is allotted in food stamps to a single individual." It died on a 14-0 Rules Committee vote.
In 2001, the General Assembly overwhelmingly adopted Mr. Van Yahres' resolution expressing profound regret for the state's involvement beginning in the 1920s with eugenics.
The discredited pseudo-science called for purifying the human race through selective breeding and became a theory underlying Nazi efforts to create a "master race" a decade later. Eugenics led to the involuntary sterilization of thousands of people in Virginia. ---------------------------------
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