In the heated race for Virginia governor, Republican candidate Jerry Kilgore is running away from both George W. Bush and his youngest brother Marvin, a central figure in a nasty landfill dispute in the usually tranquil Shenandoah Valley.
Kilgore, a former state attorney general, is in a horse race with Democratic Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine to replace Gov. Mark Warner. Virginia governors are only allowed one four-year term, and Warner’s successor will be chosen Nov. 8.
The waste-disposal controversy involving Marvin Bush was highlighted this month by Rolling Stone, picked up by a small Virginia newspaper and has since been getting some attention on political and environmental weblogs.
As a result, Kilgore aides have been scrambling to refute a claim that their boss, when he was attorney general, dragged his feet investigating problems at the Page County landfill partially owned by Marvin Bush’s investment company in McLean, Va.
Details of the dispute were spelled out in the Shenandoah Valley newspaper the News Virginian, but for Kilgore it boiled down to one key allegation:
A state inspector who found that the landfill was accepting far more waste than allowed by its permit – and causing a host of environmental problems as a result – said in an affidavit that he was “pressured by a supervisor acting on orders from higher up” to go easy on the landfill operators. Soon afterward, the inspector said, his supervisor took a job with Bush’s company, running the landfill.
The landfill was shut down by the state last year, and the subsidiary of Bush’s investment firm that owned it declared bankruptcy. Both Kilgore and his Democratic opponent, Kaine, are now taking credit for ending the illegal dumping there.
Meanwhile, Kilgore – who managed Bush’s Virginia campaign in 2004 –made the front page of the Washington Post this week by skipping a presidential speech in Norfolk, on Virginia’s eastern shore.
Kilgore insisted he simply had an important scheduling conflict, but gleeful Democrats accused him of kicking the president when’s he down.
