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1 Va. L. & Bus. Rev. 1 (2006)

handle is hein.journals/valbr1 and id is 1 raw text is: VIRGINIA LAW & BUSINESS REVIEW VOLUME 1 SPRING 2006 NUMBER 1 FOREWORD A BUSINESS APPROACH The Honorable Mark R. Warner't I studied law, chose a business career, and eventually gravitated to government service. It is my hope that the Virginia Law o Business Review will tap a wide variety of thinking from all three worlds. While I was governor of Virginia from 2002 to 2006, my administration took a business-like approach to bring efficiency, productivity, and innovation to everything we did from government operations to educating our children. In the first half of my term, Virginia faced six billion dollars in budget shortfalls. We applied business-minded principles right off the bat. We passed a law requiring the state to budget, just as businesses do, for the long term--six years instead of just two years--when calculating long-term obligations and expected revenues. We also took measures to tighten our belt. We cut state agency spending by an average of twenty percent, excluding education and other critical services. We eliminated or merged nearly seventy duplicative or unnecessary boards and commissions and eight state agencies. We did the largest consolidation of information technology services of any state in the nation, streamlined state purchasing, renegotiated contracts to leverage our buying power, and better managed the Commonwealth's real estate holdings. These measures provided tens of millions of dollars in recurring savings and helped lead to the independent, non-partisan Government Performance Project ranking Virginia the best-managed state in the nation in 2005. Mark Warner was Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia from 2002 to 2006. He has a B.A. from George Washington University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. in 1987, he co founded a wieless telecommunications company in Virginia that became Nextel Communications and later merged with Sprint PCS. As governor of Virginia, he was elected Chairman of both the National and Southern Governors' Associations. in 2005, Time magazine recognized Warner as one of the five best governors in America. Copyright © 2006 Virginia Law & Business Review Association