Building Consensus Prior to Assembly is Key to Changing Virginia’s Energy Mix

In our first two podcasts with Mark Rubin, Director at the Virginia Center for Consensus Building, he explained how the “Rubin Group” came to be, how they worked together to get three bills passed in the 2017 General Assembly and how they created five working groups to address specific issues that may be impeding progress of renewable and solar energy in the Commonwealth.

In this podcast, he talks more specifically about why the Rubin Group is important to the Commonwealth and how groups like it can offer help to our legislators by creating consensus on issues before they make it to the General Assembly.

As he explains, Virginia’s legislators are part-time and have limited staff and resources, which is by design. However, it can create a situation in which Virginia legislators don’t have time needed to solve very complex policy issues, like the energy mix in the Commonwealth.

Through the Center for Consensus Building, stakeholders — many of whom are on opposite sides of a spectrum — have the time and space needed to tackle those complex issues. As Rubin points out, when a group of stakeholders develops a compromise solution, it will probably work.

Learn more about how the Rubin Group and others like it work with the Center for Consensus Building and why Rubin says this model works for Virginia in the last in our series of interviews with him.

Link to this podcast for download: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B51RhByqqW9LQ2xGT1VkS0pnX1k